Vermont Summer

June 19. — I had come all the way from Wisconsin by bus, and I was very tired; but now, as the bus approached Vermont, my spirits began to rise. Suddenly and quite irrationally I felt that the air was turning sharper and more sweet, and that the morning light, which is hazy in the Middle West, and does little more than puzzle the flat blue distances, was becoming exaggeratedly bright.

Here and there, in the fields along the valley road, men were working rhythmically with scythes. My fellow travelers on the bus were becoming more and more alive and restless, and I myself was eager to reach my destination. I wanted to get out on the ground, to smell the hay and the pungent spice of pine-winds, and to feel with my fingers the rough bark of trees, the wet grass, and the cold, sunny earth of Vermont.

I have been looking forward to this day ever since January, when Aunt Dorothy wrote asking me if I should like to spend the summer in a cabin on her farm in the Green Mountains. I accepted the invitation gratefully. Between my freshman and sophomore years in college I was out of school for three years, living on a hill farm in southeastern Vermont. I spent my days in the woods then, hunting or fishing but more often simply wandering, finding an occasional enthusiasm for farm work, but mostly storing up a sort of forest learning which I tried to put, later, into poetry. I loved the Vermont hills more truly than I have since loved any other country; and with my love of the wilds grew up a dislike of cities. This summer will be my return to the country.

June 20. — Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John were waiting for me when I got in yesterday; they were standing on the steps of the bus station and general store, waving at the approaching bus. As I got out with my luggage I thought how warming it was to see them — Aunt Dorothy with her soft, square, kindly face, white hair and sunny eyes, Uncle John round-headed, with a brown, pointed beard and a huge, elliptical grin. After our greetings we climbed into the car and drove north along the valley road, heading for the mountain-side farm.

Presently we arrived; and then for a time we sat out in the sunshine on the porch, drinking coffee and talking, and watching the wind play in the wild rose bushes by the brook across the driveway. The early afternoon sun was at once hot and cold, and occasional tufts of gray cloud passed over the sky, each one darkening the green of the opposite hills for a single moment. My glance kept wandering, and soon Aunt Dorothy, realizing perhaps that I was eager to see my cabin (which had long been furnished in readiness for me), got up and suggested that it was time I was getting settled.

So we started off across the road and the brook into the pine woods, following a blazed, zigzag trail up the mountain through the trees. I was carrying my bag, and each of the others had something I should perhaps need: an armful of books, an extra kerosene lamp. The forest closed in behind us, and we were left in a brown darkness whose only air was the pungent scent of the pines and a whispering in the green needles above us. We proceeded slowly, for the way was steep, and my leather-soled shoes slipped continually on the glassy floor. At last the others stopped: we had reached the cabin. In most parts of the forest the low, dead branches of the pines are cleared away; but around the cabin they have been left on the trees, to ensure privacy. So we had come to my home before I had known that it was anywhere near.

With a last word of welcome, Aunt Dorothy and Uncle John set the things they had brought on the cabin steps, and turned again, starting off down the narrow trail through the woods. I felt very strange watching them go. The forest is so thick that I could see nothing but pines stretching away in every direction; and in a moment the figures of my host and hostess had become tiny, and were swallowed up. The silence was unbroken.

After I had bestowed my belongings in the two-room, story-and-a-half cabin, with its orange floor downstairs, its low ceilings, its steep, narrow stairway, and its great windows looking out into the undersea gloom of the forest, I went outside to wander around the cabin and through the woods. The trees, I found, are set mathematically close together here on the steep side of the mountain, and the interstices between them are spun loosely all the way to the sky with spidery branches. My cabin is built high on a ledge, so that its upstairs windows are hidden in a jungle of stiff green brushes; it is set in a clearing no larger than itself, and its faded gray-brown shingles bear witness to many weathers.

There are ferns and ledges all around, spattered and heaped with brown needles. But there are flowers too: the white single-flowered pyrola, with its blossom like a child’s drawing of a star; the wax-gray Indian pipe; and here and there a still-life of rust daisies. More than that, there stand in a hollow below my cabin three flowers from a different world — lady-slippers colored a deep choking red, that erect themselves on tall thin stems above luxuriant and glossy green leaves. They have no place here where everything is so spare and so accurate; but then, nothing really belongs here except the ledges and the pines. Even the ferns have a curious excrescent look in the watery light of the forest, and the other vegetation — occasional ragged clumps of grass and brush — seems almost inexcusably untidy.

June 22.— I am thoroughly settled now. Already I have learned much of my pine woods — the brooks, the spring from which I carry water, certain ledges and hollows, and the small, pine-locked clearings that are strung like beads along the shadowy paths. In spite of the mountains, the dimensions of this country are not so great as I had thought they would be; but the forest, at least, is, within itself, dimensionless. It is enclosed by fields and farm buildings everywhere but to the west; but there above me the mountain rises steep and dark to its wooded summit. There is a river to the southeast, and low hills. To the north rises Mount Equinox, and then miles and miles of the Taconic and Green Mountain ranges, lapping and folding over and over one another into a blue distance. All colors are extraordinarily intense here in the sunlight; with rain the mountains may turn to the shades of gray and purple, but they will still, I think, be luminous.

(June 25. — Sleep, and awakening in the cold early mornings. My hope of seeing deer, and my memory of the deer. Observations on the untrustworthiness of memory, whose country shapes itself according to the geography of the heart, and whose inhabitants move always soundlessly, with the strange fluidity of quicksilver.)

July 1. — The strange compulsion which sends birds south in winter, north again in spring, shows that a sense of time and of the passage of time exists not only among men. Yet I had thought that in this wood I should be free of time; and I am surprised now to find how often I am made aware of it, and by what means.

I am sitting writing at the table on the porch at the north end of my cabin. The floor of the porch is made of reddish flagstones set in earth; and on the stones, on the earth, are dozens of tiny brown beetles. Almost at every moment another one comes hurtling through the air, and lands with a slight ‘tock’ on the table, or on the stone beside my chair. Most of the beetles land, seemingly, upon their backs; or else they soon upset themselves. And then they lie nearly still, waving their legs in minute helplessness in the air.

It is a strange sight, and one which I do not wholly understand. For there is no panic in their movements — none of the frenzied struggling which I have seen overtaking other insects that have fallen like this. The beetles lie almost indolently. A sharp movement might bring them upright, but they do not make it. Still they lie unperturbed, waving their legs slowly, casually, desultorily, as if they had hours, even years, to be about their business; as if they had forever.

Do they not hear time blowing like a wind through the forest?

{July 5. — Rain; clouds on the mountain, with the fragment: —

The shadow does not die, and this forever.
The gray, miraculous flower contrived of mist
Blooms on the slope of the sky in the bluest weather. . . .

Light and shadow, and the new world made by rain in this country.)

(July 7. — The climb up to Southeast Corners, a deserted settlement on the saddle between Red Mountain and Mount Equinox. The silence of the journey, except for the chipmunks, which resented my passing, and scolded at me with a sort of inadequate anger, as if they were coughing into penny whistles. The deep green of moss on the wet stones of the brook; the red of lichens; and the deep orange rot of the fallen trees. The open saddle between the mountains, with fields of birches, which are first to reclaim deserted country. Camping; and at last, the coming of night.

FROM THIS HILL

Dawn, with mist and sun in the valley.)

July 11.—I went calling last night; and afterward walked home alone — it was past midnight — through the moonlit woods and fields. There were curious changes upon the world. Trees, rocks, buildings, all looked like phosphorescent water-colors of themselves. Yet close at hand the light was so clear that its scalpels seemed as if in another moment they would cleave the rind of earth, and expose its nerves, naked and twitching, or flay the world whole and show it like a great silver heart rocking beneath my feet. There was no sound except a single whippoorwill’s cold cataract of speech.

Suddenly the moon went behind a cloud; and the scene became a swift succession of lantern-slides, dominated always by the knowledge of light somewhere, choking, perhaps, but still living in its source. At length, after much shadowy warfare, the moon approached the edge of its cloud — not softly or silently, but with such a beat of color and rhythm, so much illusion of sound, that it seemed like the climax of a symphony. Then the moon appeared — small and ruin-white; and the music stopped as if some hand had taken up all the strings at once, and snapped them swiftly and jarringly. So always, I thought, feeling the implied distinction between drama and mere pageantry.

Today it is raining, but echoes of the moon have persisted in my mind, and I have tried to put them to paper. It is hard to say why any poem is written; in this case it may have been the need to find a symphonic language for an experience involving music, but that would be only an approximate truth. Here is the poem, at any rate. It is entitled

O THIS UNLOOKED-FOR

(July 16. — The birds: crows, who are ‘the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.’ The swallows and red-winged blackbirds by the river.)

(July 19. — The snails: the undersea ballet of their movement across the forest floor, at night, after rain.)

(July 20. — The deadly Amanitas, and their fresh growth and fresh ruin each morning. What eats them? Can it be the squirrels, which are beginning to appear? No; birds, I suppose, which I think eat the snails too, since I have seen, on the forest floor, shells chipped and splintered like stars. But perhaps larger animals as well eat the mushrooms — what may not be foraging through the woods while I am asleep? I cannot help thinking of this: —

MIDNIGHT

July 25. — There is, indeed, much more life about in these woods than I had realized. Birds, snails, squirrels, chipmunks — they have enforced my attention with increasing insistency. And now I have a new neighbor, one who concerns me closely; the Better Mouse has beaten a path to my door.

I have been aware of his occupancy for several days, as a matter of fact, for he has indicated his presence at my breakfast table with no great delicacy. But last night I saw him for the first time. I was reading, lying in bed on my stomach, with my lamp and book on the floor alongside, and close by a box of crackers, from which I was eating abstractedly. Suddenly I heard a loud skirmishing noise, and the patter of little feet; and there was my mouse, bickering down a rafter.

He is a large, handsome, red and white creature, this mouse, with none of the unfriendliness which has limited my contact with other mice up to the present. Without a single preliminary move he switched up to the box of crackers, his nose quivering; and in a moment he was standing erect, his front paws hidden in waxed paper. He was sniffing feverishly. In another moment he would have been inside the box. But I was recovering from the first shock tactics, and I could not allow this last. I raised my hand. The mouse skipped nimbly away; instantly he was back. I picked up a shoe.

The mouse must have realized by this time that the atmosphere had become ominous; now he all but tiptoed to the cracker box, one eye and ear upon me, the others devoted nervously to the business of anticipation. I drew a silent bead, and let fly with my shoe. The mouse gave an outraged squeak, jumped inches up and sideways, and disappeared in a scatter of dust under the bed.

I knew, though, that he would come back. I picked up the cracker box and put it out of reach, extracting one cracker, which I dropped on the floor close to the bed. Try to get away with that, I thought, picking up my other shoe and taking a firm grip upon it.

I had to wait, for quite a while, but finally the mouse returned, zigzagging artfully, all his attention centred on me.

I waited. He reached the cracker and picked it up. I heaved the shoe. Once more the mouse squeaked and leaped sideways; but he managed to hang on to the cracker, and vanished with it, again under the bed. That was the last I saw of him. Presently a loud munching noise began somewhere in the walls; and I fell asleep so, with the sounds of murine enjoyment ringing in my ears.

I do not think I can allow this to go on.

(July 31. - The single lines of spiderweb that shimmer here and there among the trees, turning red and green in the afternoon sunlight. The snails gone; the Amanitas gone, and new spired mushrooms appearing. I am reminded of that poem of Elinor Wylie’s which ends

It is perhaps cruel of me, in the face of the beauty of these lines, to say that I have decided to get a mousetrap, and set it.)

August 2. — There have been many squirrels about lately, the younger ones wrestling and scampering around, chasing each other in mad circles over the forest floor, the older ones coursing (with hardly more dignity) through the treetops. Why the squirrels have appeared so recently I do not know; I saw few enough early in the summer. The thing that has at last drawn them out. of hiding seems to be the pine cones, which, if they have not gotten ripe, have attained a degree of succulence that makes them, finally, irresistible.

Apparently pine cones are the squirrel’s artichokes; he eats them, at any rate, in the same way, leaf by leaf, taking one juicy bite out of each leaf and dropping the rest on the ground. The litter that has grown up in this forest as a result is amazing. At any t ime, walking through the woods, I am likely to have what looks like an old, dried-up apple core dropped on the ground beside me, and then, looking up apprehensively, to see overhead a squirrel smacking his lips and rubbing them on a near-by branch to get the pitch off of them before he proceeds to the next cone. I am ordinarily tolerant of small pleasures, but I wish the squirrels’ habits of personal cleanliness would extend to their surroundings. When I came here the forest looked like a well-ordered French park; now it looks as though a carpenter had been at work in it, and had hurried away without bothering to pick up his shavings.

As a last wanton untidiness, the squirrels have recently started extensive digging operations everywhere, rooting up pine needles and leaf mould with unreasoning vigor. I do not think they are burying anything; probably they have simply realized that autumn is not far off, and are brushing up on their digging, just in case they had forgotten how.

August 8. — At last I have caught my mouse; and I am deeply sorry for it. How could I have forgotten so far what death does to eyes, to soft bodies? And now that the trap is sprung and set aside, I keep remembering the scurryings, the ruminative sounds in the dark, the sort of military companionship which lay in having my enemy close at hand. I see again all those glances I got from patent-leather eyes — hilarious and puzzled, mocking and stubborn, but always quick and full of life, full of a curious pride. I shall not see them again.

This is of course material made for the sentimentalist, and perhaps that is what I am. But in my mind is the familiar verse from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: ’Each man kills the thing he loves.’ I wonder if a strange mutation of this would not be as true — that each man loves the thing he kills? If so, it is in this way that I now regret my mouse.

And so it may be perhaps that the murderer returns to the scene of his murder; not from fear of detection, for that would be stupid, but as a necessary part of a strange love affair unsuspected even by himself. I can imagine a man killing his enemy not for any harm he might so escape, but to be able to look once, full and unembarrassed, into the other’s eyes, to see what he might read there; and then be strangely bewildered, having, at last, not understood what it was that he saw.

Surely, at any rate, killing is the least conclusive thing that any man may do.

He must be bound afterward by ties which he himself cannot explain, and forever cannot resolve. Then let the murderer return to the dark house; and, if you will, be taken there. But as he is led silently away, think once that what he is feeling may not be terror, but disbelief — emptiness — a queer loneliness, because somehow, after all, he has heard no sound in the shadows, no creaking step on the landing of the dark stairs.

For no one, I think, no matter what he says, really believes in death. Not even I, who have seen my mouse in his trap, and carried him away myself.

(August 15. — The real coming, at last, of summer, with the death of air, and the cicadas scraping and buttering their wings in the hot noon.)

August 19. It rained again this evening, suddenly and heavily. The sky changed from blue to gunmetal almost imperceptibly, as if it were always implicit with storm, and this were only the inking-in of a sketch. After a few minutes of downpour, with the clouds lying punctured and broken-backed over the mountain tops, the sky cleared, or partly so; and a rainbow appeared in the east, part of its fail obscured by a low blur of running cloud.

The farmer from whom I get my milk pointed to the sky as I came down toward him through the meadow, and said with a wide grin, ‘A rainbow like that one means good luck; or so they say.’ So they say, I reflected on my way home later—they being all that crew of superstitious folk who gape at science: whose faiths are always in the undemonstrable. I, though I could not put into accurate words the scientific cause for the rainbow’s occurrence, know at least that, such a cause exists. Therefore I see beauty alone; and in this some mystery, even some hope, perhaps, but only for myself.

I am wrong, of course — not for knowing that science can account for the rainbow, but for complicating something which is otherwise so simple. For surely what men believe in their hearts, what has meaning for them, is more important than any scientific truth. What the farmer said had nothing to do with science, nor was it meant to have. I who deal with words know that they are symbols, and believe in them, or not, for arbitrary reasons of my own. So the rainbow is a symbol — of hope, in this case, but more powerful than any word; it is the thing which, not of man, but stemming from man’s most intimate earth, bends closer to heaven than anything else he wall ever see, and returns to his neighbor’s field as lovely as it left his own.

By the time I reached my cabin the rainbow had faded; a few westering clouds had taken yellow from the sunken sun and projected the color upon the forest floor, so that the pines loomed like black spars in a sea of clear orange light. Beautiful, simple, of obvious meaning — why should the poet always feel that it is he who must teach from beauty? I thought. If he sees beauty, though dimly and for a moment only, surely others must do the same, and be somehow the lovelier for it themselves. Even the tyrant must torture himself with rainbows, and be shaken in what he has made himself believe.

At my feet a bird flushed from a clump of wet fern and rose in a perfect arc to the top of a near-by pine. So this too means good luck, I thought; or hope; or it is a symbol for hope, which in itself may be no more than a symbol for belief.

August 26. — The summer — the real summer — is almost over now. Only a few days ago I was sure that it had come; now it is nearly gone. When I awake in the mornings there is a new chilly quality to the air; the pine branches outside my window teeter gustily; and everywhere there is a swift shifting pattern of clarified light and shadow that has nothing to do with the vague, exhausted patterns of summer.

The calendar will say that it is summer still for almost another month; but calendar seasons and real seasons are hardly more than approximate. Perhaps time is too far linked in human minds with personal change, and I am construing for the season of my departure (for I must go soon) a separate weather, as if to say: this is the fallingoff, the time of change. Yet I think it is more than that. The young trees that cannot wait to die have already burst into a brash crimson in the hedgerows, and there is a hurried note now in the calling of the crows. When I walk in the meadow, beside the brook, the crows rise from their dead sentinel trees scalding the air with a new, urgent disdain; and they do not fly as they once did: they are blown rather, pitching in the tall cold wind over miles of sky as if they had mounted some frosty carrousel, which beat, beat in monstrous, erratic circles, rhythmically, but without music.

There are fewer periods of quiet, and even these are implicit now with the subtleties of change. Sometimes the wind wedges all cloud from the sky for a few translucent moments, and I can see the near hills with an acid clearness, each tree upon them minutely concerned with shape and perspective, like cardboard figures seen through a stereoscope. The wineglass elms that seemed to drowse all summer in the mowings go wild and shaggy at the briefest touch of wind, and the fluid shadows of the pines seem to have congealed, from chemistry, not from cold. For the weeks that I have been here the pines have stood suffused with their own darkness, their stratified branches like clots of green tea leaves steeping, filling the surrounding air with a warm, slow, eddying shadow. The shadows have curded now. All but the sharpest contrasts have dissolved away from the wood; and the wind is still blowing.

So autumn, with its beauty and its persistent sadness, moves upon the world. The summer, at least, has been happy; and I prefer to remember it so. I shall not keep this diary any longer.