Sweets for Squirrels

I

THE sap knows nothing of depression. Our March weather, warm while the sun is up, freezing hard at night, is ideal for its run, and some of my neighbors who make syrup are busy. But nobody taps my trees except the red squirrels and an occasional sapsucker. The sapsucker is a greedy fellow, who gets positively drunk on maple juice. I have seen one on a large sugar tree in such a befuddled condition that the best he could do was to cling to the bark and crawl around and around the trunk, while I pursued him till I was even dizzier than he and had to give up the attempt to lay hands on him. But the squirrels carry their liquor better.

I have a considerable sugar bush, some of it consisting of small saplings growing thickly along the edge of a swamp. To-day I walked through this stand and noted the great number of squirrel marks on the young trees. In every case there were two small, triangular bits of the tender outer bark lifted from the apex, but not disengaged at the base. The two bases faced each other, about a third of an inch apart, and of course the tiny triangles were on a horizontal. In every case one nip (whether made with the upper or lower jaw I cannot say, as I have n’t yet caught a squirrel in the act close enough to observe) is shallow, and does not bleed. The other cuts deep enough to penetrate the cambium layer and bring forth a small flow of sap. The animal must taste a drop and then move on, for there were hundreds of teeth marks in my little trees, though the number of squirrels is small. In some cases there would be half a dozen nips on one sapling, starting a couple of feet from the ground and recurring every foot or so. I examined a great many saplings, and found innumerable scars from previous years. Of course, after the tree attains some size and its bark ridges, they disappear.

In the larger trees the squirrels run out on horizontal limbs till the diameter is small enough to enable them to nip, and then they bite, on the top side. As I walked toward the house I noticed one large maple which glistened between me and the low afternoon sun like a crystal chandelier. Its outer branches were festooned with little icicles four or five inches long, each one, of course, made by the slow drip of sap from a squirrel bite. It had not been warm enough to-day to melt them off; indeed, it was even now freezing. But the March sun kept enough sap running to build them larger by the hour.

Reaching up, I broke off one of these icicles, first bending down the branch to make sure of its origin. I put it in my mouth and sucked it. It was smooth and cold and faintly sweet, but had no particular flavor of maple. What taste it had was of bark. It certainly would not satisfy a human with what our parents called ‘a sweet tooth.’ But to the squirrels it is evidently a greatly relished luxury.

The woodchucks had been out today, also. Since my dog died, they have become a nuisance, for I lack his persistence in pursuit of them. They had worked themselves out of their burrows, though the ground is frozen, and in some cases had actually made fresh holes. And they had gone from door to door of their house systems over the lingering snow, making little packed paths yellowed with the dirt from their feet and bellies. Some of them had wandered off, too, perhaps in search of a bit of spring green, leaving paw marks on the snow. Here and there they had nibbled at the bark of small trees, and of course had picked out, in every case, trees I wished to preserve. They are perverse beasts. One with a passion for violets got into my rock garden last year. He troubled nothing else, but, as fast as a violet plant developed buds, off he sheared them as with a pair of scissors. However, I felt rather sorry for the chucks to-day. Here they have been snugly asleep all winter, and they wake up at the appointed time to find that the season is foolishly belated. They emerge, hungry, into a frozen world, and find only snow where there should be tender grass spears or clover tips poking from the ground.

II

But I did not go out into the sugar bush intentionally to observe either squirrels or woodchucks. I went out to work on a trail I am building, along a scries of limestone ledges which constitute my natural rock garden. Two of my friends, apparently unaffected by the depression, are in Bermuda playing golf. Another is at Virginia Hot Springs indulging in the same pastime.

They don’t like our Northern March storms and mud, and they do like golf. I like golf myself. I had watched them depart with some wistfulness, and smiled crookedly at their entreaties to ‘come along.’

But as I worked on my ledges to-day my thoughts took quite another turn. Here is a steep incline of mossy limestone, perhaps eight feet high, and below it a very steep bank plunging down to an old stone wall and open pasture. It is shadowed by large maples and white ash trees. Down from the top hung festoons of wild grape and bittersweet, which also climbed to the tops of the trees and were choking the leaders to death. On the bank below grew a tangle of vines and chokecherries. Probably nobody had paid any attention to this rough corner of the farm for fifty years. But the slab of mossy limestone was literally covered with walking fern, the lovely plants, with their starfish forms, still palely green after the winter, and making a hundred dainty patterns. I worked steadily, in the solitude, pulling the vines off the rock and down out of the trees. (Did you ever try to pull a fifty-foot wild grape out of a tree? It clings with the thousand-fingered persistence of an octopus.) Then I hacked away at the chokecherries which obstructed the bank and half hid the ferns from view. Finally I hewed out the frozen earth just below the ledge with a mattock, and toiled down and up, down and up, fetching rocks from the old wall, till I had made a narrow but level footpath on the transverse of the bank below my rock garden, so in future I can walk comfortably along it and survey the ferns.

And as I toiled my mind was functioning in that half-aimless fashion the mind always follows when the hands are busy. Golf — Bermuda — Virginia Hot Springs — men in locker rooms drinking and swapping alibis for a missed putt or a sliced drive — evening clothes — bridge — ‘ What shall we do to-morrow ? ’ — presently a considerable bill to pay. Golf — a silly game, really. Well, where does it get you? Over and over the same piece of ground, which has been tortured by excavations out of all semblance to a landscape, hitting a ball. The ball leaves no track in the air, no trace on the ground. When you have hit it from seventy-five to one hundred and ten times, according to your skill, you go into the locker room and talk about it. If you are on a vacation, you probably talk about it most of the evening. But the shell-shot land over which you have been tramping is no different; you have added nothing to it, subtracted nothing from it. The sea winds whistle over it, or the shadows come down from the Blue Ridge, while it awaits the morrow’s pursuit of phantoms by these strange forked radishes in trousers.

I tugged viciously at a grapevine which was strangling a young maple. The tree bent, I strained; suddenly the tendrils loosed their hold, and I sat abruptly down, coiled in red-brown tentacles. The tree snapped upright again, and its freed top pointed triumphantly skyward. I looked at it, and then at the opening above it, toward which it aspired. In ten years, twenty years, it will reach up forty, sixty feet, and spread its green top to fill that opening! I had given it life by that lusty tug. My vision saw it a foreststraight and green-topped thing of beauty, shadowing my fern garden. And I knew I was better employed than if I had been playing golf.

Presently I walked along the little trail I had built at the base of the ledge. Not all of the ledge is draped with walking fern. Much of it, indeed, bears only moss and lichens. I studied it for pockets. Yes, there were many, little cracks or water pits which can be filled with earth and have in each a maidenhair or ebony spleenwort planted. There are tiny ledges, too, for nodding columbine and bluebells. Larger ferns can be planted along my foot trail and against the base of the ledge. Woodland shrubs and flowers can be set in where I removed the chokecherry. I shall have to keep right after the chokecherry and the bittersweet and the wild grape for two or three years, probably, before I discourage them. But in time I shall have here, on this steep ledge overhung with the shadow of great trees, a natural rock garden of dainty charm, a spot of secluded loveliness.

I looked out through the naked trees, across the field and the road, and up the wall of the mountain where the birches were stippled in gray and lavender on the steep white wall — for in the mountain woods the snow still lies deep. A man, I thought, would be captious indeed who asked for a fairer prospect. The sky, to be sure, was gray and cold. There was no Caribbean blue, no turquoise sea. But we shall have blue skies, as blue as any, and pink apple blossoms, soon. Which reminded me that I must, before dark, bring in a few apple logs from the old tree which blew down this winter, for the evening fires. There will be no bridge while they blaze, and no hotel orchestra blaring jazz. Talk, plans for the garden, maybe a little Mozart on the piano, or Sullivan, or Bach, a book, work.

III

It was at this point that I saw the crystal-spangled tree, and tasted the faintly sweet icicle. As such old, familiar sensations will, this one brought back my boyhood. I thought of a pleasant Yankee land without motor cars, when it was an adventure to go to the next town. And the next town was not like your town. It had an individuality of its own. If you took a ten-mile walk, you had traveled in foreign parts. There was no radio. You took your tooth powder on faith, and Father played ‘The Mikado’ on the piano while you and the neighbors’ children stood in a half circle around him and bellowed lustily of the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la. Life had certain grim realities, too, one of which was a bucksaw. So many sticks to buck up, or you could n’t go coasting! And you made your ‘doublerunner’ (now called a bobsled, and degraded to international competition) yourself, for most households then were manual-training schools, to the great benefit of the younger generation and the tax rate.

I found no pathos in this distance. They were happy days, and happy to remember. The squirrel runs out on a maple twig and satisfies his desire for sweets by a nip of the teeth. We boys wanted sweets, and we bored a hole in the tree and boiled the sap on the stove; or we wanted adventure and we ran logs on the mill pond or hiked to the next town through the woods; or we wanted sport and we cut hockey sticks out of bent hickory saplings or built a double-runner. Shall I bemoan the fate of the poor little sons of the erstwhile rich, whose fathers have suddenly lost their incomes and can no longer be drawn upon ad libitum for runabouts, outboard motors, imported skis, and tuxedos? Or shall I pity the fathers who (like me) cannot get to Bermuda for their March golf? Is it to be superior to the squirrel to have habits and desires only satisfied by a great expenditure of money and a complicated organization of society which requires hundreds to work for us? Is man so great if that is his superiority? The ants and bees can organize a complicated society, perhaps better than we. But neither ants nor bees nor squirrels can plant a tree deliberately to compose into a landscape; they cannot savor beauty, or create new forms of it out of their consciousness, or from their surroundings and from their spirit conjure pictures and ideas which bring happiness. How little income has to do with these things; how close they are to the physical simplicities of life; how little dependent on those artificial aids to living and to time killing which have become in latter years the gods of our idolatry!

There was a young man at the house the other day, a poet. He has published but one slender volume, and that dropped silently into the restless sea of new books, though it had the merits of delicate observation of Nature and genuine feeling. But this is a tough age for poets — ‘hard-boiled’ I think is the word. He had walked over to see me, a matter of ten miles. Once that would n’t have surprised me in the least. I often walked twenty or thirty miles in a day, at his age. But now I found myself amazed. Of course, he has no car, and no money to buy one. But he is no more unhappy about that than about the public indifference to his poems.

He has bought a little strip of land up in the hills, and a tiny barn, or rather a shed. The shed he moved to this land, piece by piece, and reërected it, sheathing it against the weather. He installed a stove, a bed, a table, and a chair or two. He has a spring. Now and then he works on a wood job, or for a farmer who is short-handed, and earns enough to buy food, oil, what few clothes he needs, and plenty of white paper and a few books. Behind his house are the woods and mountains. He is quite content. He is n’t imitating Thoreau. He is simply the same sort of solitary, drawing his nourishment from the simplicities of Nature. When he sits in my study, and we talk of night sounds, and winter colors, and the long tramps the pheasants take, or discuss poetry, I am always a little ashamed of the litter of possessions which surround me — books, prints, tobacco jars, Dresden figures, overstuffed chairs, telephones, golf clubs, mirrors, goodness knows what all, accumulated to minister to the supposed needs of one unimportant human being who can hardly be considered an individual unless he can stand alone, free of such truck, and find his happiness in the creative power of his spirit, or, at the very least, of his own two hands.

‘He lives in that little shack, and vegetates,’ somebody said scornfully of this poet. ‘He does n’t ever work more than a week at a time.’ They said the same of Thoreau. Our national creed, perhaps, has not greatly changed at bottom. ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,’ said Thoreau’s most eminent neighbor, who also was a bit strange to his generation, though he lived normally, in a handsome house, and ‘kept his fences up.’ Until at last we announced it as our world destiny to provide all men with such material comforts as they had never known before, with motor cars and radios and tiled bathrooms and silk stockings and fur coats and drama shipped in cans and macadam highways to each door and ‘hot dogs’ procurable every fifty feet and stocks that would make you rich overnight and ‘higher education,’ and what have you, as the boys say. To be without all these things was to be almost a pariah. Not to want them was to be a freak. We organized ourselves into a vast society to produce them, entirely based for its stability on our desire and ability to consume them.

Then something went wrong.

I wish it were the desire to consume them which had suddenly vanished, but such is not the case. It is merely the ability to pay for them which has departed. And blithely we chirrup that all will be well again when that ability is restored. Why will it? Why shall we not begin the same old round again, moving toward the same conclusion? My poet does not work,except as necessity compels, and he is therefore looked upon with suspicion and contempt, as though there were some sin in possessing few physical desires and a strong spiritual desire only to be satisfied by leisure and contemplation.

A man who leases a piece of city ground, and subleases it at a large profit to somebody who erects a skyscraper thereon, is regarded as a busy and enterprising fellow. All he has done is to raise the rents of a thousand tenants. A stockbroker bellows in the Exchange as he buys and sells on margin, trying to make money for himself or others by the lottery route. He works hard. But to what end? He has created nothing. Life could conceivably go on exactly as well, or perhaps better, without him. A manufacturer ‘puts out’ something which nobody is conscious of particularly needing or even wanting, or which is no better or worse than a dozen other products of the same kind. So he advertises. He lines the highways with billboards; he sends forth sales talks on the ether, to boom into a million sitting rooms; he makes us ‘conscious’ of his product, and thus creates a demand. As the demand for his product generally has to mean the slackening of demand for somebody else’s product, the final gain to the community is somewhat difficult for the ordinary mind to discover. But he unquestionably works. Therefore he is admirable. It is the creed. If his product is a novelty, he has, of course, added one more physical ‘necessity’ to complicate our desires; one more Thing has climbed into the saddle. Such a novelty was the automobile. The resultant complications in our life are staggering.

IV

Is there no way out of our dilemma but to emulate the squirrel, or the poet, and be content with simple sweets? At least it is a way which has its rewards. To rediscover the world of simplicities, the joy of creating with one’s own hands, the profound satisfactions of expressing an inner sense of beauty through the manipulation of visible forms, — trees, plants, paints, notes of music, or what not, — the relief of a slackened quest for Things, is to rediscover, perhaps, one’s self. Barring, of course, a condition of definite physical privation and lack of the means of sustenance, which no civilized society can long tolerate, it is impossible for some of us to look with any profound grief on depression, even our own, on the condition of people who have to give up their chauffeur, or cannot turn in the old car for a new one, or have to forgo the usual trip to White Sulphur, or reduce movie-going to once a week, or wear woolens instead of fur. I cannot weep for the schoolboy who cries in vain for a coonskin coat, or for the wife who is forced to forgo bridge for domestic science.

It is too obvious that our boasted standard of living has meant largely the possession of Things, in the Emersonian sense, which in themselves are of no real value, and in the uses to which we have put them have added little or nothing to the sum total of rational human progress. Rather have they got in the way of the spirit, and stifled man’s spiritual self-expression. So if depression, after an adjustment which gives to the toiling millions (who never, after all, reached very deep down into this grab bag of material blessings) a chance for self-support, leaves us less enthusiastic to scramble for possessions, less hag-ridden by Things, a little shaken in our conviction that simple leisure is abominable per se, and work, per se, always admirable, I for one shall rejoice.

But I’m not overly hopeful.

To-night the sun set behind the mountain without display. A cool green lay around the horizon, save in the north, where dark clouds of gunmetal color piled up and threatened wind. The lacy branches of the maples dissolved against the darkening sky, and the gnarled, powerful trunks of the old apple trees, black in the orchard, were tortured giants frozen to immobility during some struggle — like Laocoön’s, perhaps. But down somewhere in their hollow limbs a little screech owl was whimpering softly, a note of pleasant melancholy. The day died quietly, coolly, in gray and green. But gray and green are lovely colors. Must I sigh always for Caribbean blue? Must I think life has passed me by because I cannot chase a golf ball in the resorts of fashion? Do I dare indulge any self-pity, who have this bit of lovely land to call my own, and hands to work it, and vision to see it yet more fair? I shall go in and see if I can balance the budget to permit the purchase of a few dozen plants for my rock garden. They are cheaper than golf balls, and far more enduring.

And to-morrow I shall go out again where the squirrels seek their sweets, and seek mine in the toil of my hands and the vision of a garden. If that does not bring a richer satisfaction than ‘material prosperity,’ then the squirrel is my superior — which I have suspected all along.