Some Winter Days in Iowa — III. March--And A Spring Bouquet

III. MARCH--AND A SPRING BOUQUET

Every pilgrim to the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in sunny valleys where the tender goddess first reveals herself at Nature's living altars.

Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she will first appear.

She delights in surprising her votaries.

Thoreau was right in saying that no man was ever alert enough to behold the first manifestation of spring.

Sometimes as we walk toward the mossy bank in the glen where the fresh green leaves of the haircap mosses were last year's first signs of vernal verdure, the bluebird calls to us from the torch-like top of the smooth sumac and shyly tells us that, if we please, spring is here.

Sometimes we thrill with the "honk, honk" of the Canada goose and think the A-shaped band of migrants is surely this year's messenger, crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the goddess and make her paths straight; but a little later we pass through a shadowy ravine where the white oaks have held their leaves all winter, and find that the great horned owl has already appropriated a last year's hawk's nest and deposited therein her two white eggs.

At the foot of the sunny hill where the spring has freely flowed all winter long, we tramp around the swamp in the vain hope of finding the purplish monk's-hood of the skunk's cabbage; but look up to see, instead, the many "mouse ears," shining like bits of silvery fur, along the slender stems of the pussy willow.

Or we tramp through a hazel thicket, where the squirrels have been festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms.

We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every flower-bud spring is peeping.

Nature's first flowers are those of the amentaceous trees, and the earliest of these are the pussy willow, the quaking asp, and the hazel.

All of them are quick to respond to the kindly influences of a vase of water and a sunny window and we may have all three of these first blossoms in a spring bouquet at home by the first of March.

Towards the last of February the catkins of the pussy willows and the aspens are creeping from beneath their budscales to meet the goddess of spring half way, and every warm day in March coaxes them a little farther.

Meanwhile the staminate catkins of the hazel are lengthening and the pistillate buds are swelling, as the sun presses farther northward at the dawn and the dusk of each day, pushing back the gray walls of the cañon of night, that the river of day may flow full and free.

* * * * * This year some of the aspens heralded the spring.

They grew at the head of a little creek which traversed a long, sunny, sheltered swamp.

Their gray green trunks were in the foreground of the Master Planter's color design, the darker and taller background being a mixture of wild cherry, red oak, linden, and white ash.

The high notes were given by the rose purple of the raspberry, the dark maroon of the blackberry, and the orange varnished budscales of the aspens themselves,--Nature never forgets her color accents.

In the earliest warm days of February the catkins of the aspens were peeping from their imprisoning scales, and by the first of March they were half out, their white silken fringes and tiny clusters of rose-pink stamens glistening in the sunlight as if spring's pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur.

We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain and a meadow."

Only an aspen tree in an Iowa slough!

Yes, but more than that.

This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring.

When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; that whosoever entered the temple of Lindus, to do honor to Demeter, the productive and nourishing power of the earth, must be pure in heart if he would gain reward.

The square, the flag, the cross, the swelling bud of spring, what are they all but symbols of the realities?

We shall forget these first humble flowers of spring by-and-by when we find a brilliant cardinal flower, or a showy lady's slipper, just as we forget the timid, tender tones of the bluebird when the grand song of the grosbeak floods the evening air, or the exquisite melody of the hermit thrush spiritualizes the leafy woods; just as many a man forgets the ministrations of his humbler friends in early life when he has climbed into the society of those whom earth calls great.

But the aspens will neither grieve nor murmur.

They will continue to make delightful color contrasts with their smooth white trunks at the gateways of the dark woods in winter and whisper to every lightest breeze with their delicate leaves in summer.

The aspen, like the grass, hastens to cover every wound and burn on the face of nature.

It follows the willow in reclaiming the sandy river bottoms and replaces the pines which fire has swept from the Rocky Mountain slopes.

It has a record in the rocks and a richer story in literature.

Its trembling leaves have caught the attention of all the poets from Homer until now.

The Scottish legend says they tremble because the cross of Calvary was made from an aspen tree.

The German legend says the trembling is a punishment because the aspen refused to bow when the Lord of Life walked in the forest.

But the Hebrew chronicler says that the Lord once made his presence upon the earth heard in the movement of the aspen leaves.

"And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a sound of going in the tops of the aspen [wrongly translated mulberry] trees, that then thou shalt go forth to battle; for God is gone before thee to smite the host of the Philistines."

What a fine conception of the nearness of the Omnipresent and the gentleness of the Almighty!

No sound or sign from the larger trees!

Only the whisper of the lightest leaves in the aspen tops when the Maker of the world went by!

The aspen was made the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine.

And Homer, in describing the Cyclops' country, speaks of it as a land of soft marshy meadows, good rich crumbling plow land, and beautiful clear springs, with aspens all around them.

How much that sounds like a description of Iowa!

* * * * * The willow is equally distinguished.

The roots of its "family tree" are in the cretaceous rocks and its branches spread through the waters of Babylon, the Latin eclogues, the wondrous fire in the Knightes' Tale, Shakespeare's plays, the love songs of Herrick and Moore, and across the ocean to the New World, adorning the sermons of Cotton Mather, the humor of Hosea Bigelow, and the nature poems of Whittier.

_"For ages, on our river borders, These tassels in their tawny bloom And willowy studs of downy silver Have prophesied of spring to come.

"Thanks, Mary, for this wildwood token Of Freya's footsteps drawing near;

Almost, as in the rune of Asgard, The growing of the grass I hear."

_ Nor must the hazel in this earliest spring bouquet be forgotten.

The crimson stars of its fertile flowers, ten or a dozen little rays at the ends of the scaly buds on the bare stems, are the most richly colored flowers of the earliest spring.

Some years they are formed as early as the twentieth of March.

When you find them then look for the re-appearance of the mud-turtles down in the valleys and listen for the first feeble croaks of the frogs.

The old Greeks watched the tiny inner scales of these fertile flowers grow into the husk of the nut, fancied its resemblance to a helmet, and called the bush _corys_;

whence its botanic name _corylus_.

Its English name comes from the Saxon _haesle_, a cap.

The growing hazel nuts gladdened the children of most of the early civilized world.

One of the shepherds in Vergil's fifth eclogue invites the other to "sit beneath the grateful shade, which hazels interlaced with elms have made;" but this hazel of which Menelaus spoke was a tree.

The Romans regarded the hazel as an emblem of peace and a means of reconciling those who had been estranged.

When the gods made Mercury their messenger they gave him a hazel rod to be used in restoring harmony among the human race.

Later he added the twisted serpents at the top of this caduceus.

The caduceus also had the power of producing sleep, hence Milton calls it "the opiate rod."

When the crimson threads appear in the scaly buds the staminate catkins are lengthening, and soon the high wind shakes the golden pollen over all the copse.

These flowers which appear before the leaves all depend upon the wind for their fertilization.

That is why they come before the leaves.

And there is always wind enough to meet all their needs.

March is a masculine month.

It was named after the war god and it always lives up to its traditions.

It has had scant courtesy from the literary men.

_"Ah, passing few are they who speak, Wild, stormy month, in praise of thee."

_ 'Twas a night in March when little Gavroche took his infant protegés into the old elephant which stood in the Place de la Bastile to shelter them from the cruel wind.

It was in the twilight of a day in March, when the wind howled dismally, that Boniface Willet, in _Barnaby Rudge_, flattened his fat nose against the window pane and made one of his famous predictions.

It must have been a March freshet when the Knight Huldebrand put Bertalda into Kuhleborn's wagon and the gentle Undine saved them both.

And we fancy that it was a cold night in March when Peter stood by the fire and warmed himself.

But the winds of March deserve a word of praise, as everyone knows who has filled his lungs with their vitalizing freshness and felt the earth respond to their purifying influence.

They are only boisterous, not cruel.

The specters of miasma and contagion flee before them like the last leaves.

Many of the oaks have held a wealth of withered foliage all the winter but now the leaves fly almost as fast as they did in late October, and make a dry, rustling carpet up to your shoe tops.

Now and again the wind gets down into this leaf-carpet and makes merry sport.

Listen to the majestic roar of the winds in a grove of rugged oaks, and then again, for contrast, where the timber on the river bottom is all-yielding birch.

It is like changing from the great _diapason_ to the _dulciana_ stop.

In the mixed woodlands, so common in Iowa, the effect is even more delightful.

The coarse, angular, unyielding twigs of the oaks give deep tones like the vibrations of the thick strings on the big double bass.

The opposite, widespreading twigs of the ash sing like the cello, and the tones of the alternate spray of the lindens are finer, like the viola.

The still smaller, opposite twigs of the maples murmur like the tender tones of the altos and the fine, yielding spray of the birches, the feathery elm and the hackberry make music pure and sweet as the wailing of the first violins.

When the director of this _maestoso_ March movement signals _fortissimo_ the effect is sublime and the fine ear shall not fail to detect the overtones which come from the hop hornbeams and the hazel in the undergrowth below.

In keeping with the majestic orchestra is the continuous noise of grinding ice from the river.

There is a sign at the edge of the birch swamp which says: "Positively no trespassing allowed here"--but it is not necessary now, for the river has overflowed the swamp and big masses of ice lean up against the trunks of the birches.

Out in the main channel the river is swiftly flowing, packed with ice floes, from the little clear fragments which shine like crystals, to the great masses as big as the side of a house, bearing upon them the accumulated dust and dirt and uncleanness of the winter.

Pieces of trees, trunks and roots, cornstalks from fields along the shore, all are being carried seaward.

In the middle of the river the prow of a flat boat projects upward from between two huge ice floes which have mashed it, like a miniature wreck in arctic seas.

The best view of this annual ice spectacle is to look up the river and see the big field of broken, tumbling, crashing, grinding ice coming down.

Farther down, at the narrows of the river, where the heavy timber shuts out the sunlight, the ice has not given way and here a gorge is formed.

Hundreds of tons of ice are washed swiftly up to it and stop with a crash.

The water backs up, flows over the banks and fills up all the summer fish ponds along the shore.

Some of it forces its way through, foaming into a white spray.

By-and-bye, under the combined influence of the rushing water and the ever increasing weight of the ice, the gorge gives way and the irresistible floes pass on with a mighty crash to their dissolution in the summery waters away down the Mississippi.

After many months of shrouded death this new life of the river is also a symbol of the resurrection.

* * * * * There are other days in March so soft and beautiful that they might well have a place in May.

_"And in thy reign of blast and storm, Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day When the changed winds are soft and warm, And heaven puts on the blue of May."

_ From the summit of a thinly-treed hill we look across a wide valley on the right which gradually slopes up to a high ridge three miles away.

On the left there is a clear view for fully twenty miles, out to where the lavender haze hangs softly on the forest-fringed horizon.

The plowed fields lie mellow and chocolate-hued in the sunlight and the russet meadows are beginning to show a faint undertone of green.

The golden green of the willow fences which separate some of the fields shines from afar in the abundant light and there is a quickening crimson in the tops of the red maple groves around the homesteads.

The deep blue of the high-domed sky gives a glory to the landscape.

The few, far clouds, soft and white, float slowly in the azure sea and now and then approach the throne of the king of day, sending dark shadows chasing the sunlight over the smiling fields.

When these shadows reach the nearer woodlands across the valley on the right it is as if a moving belt of dark pines was swiftly passing through the deciduous forest.

We think of Birnam wood removing to Dunsinane, but that was trivial compared with this.

The dark belt of shadow makes a strong and beautiful contrast to the reddish brown and gray of the winter woods.

The river is more than bank full.

Shut in on one side by the high ridge upon which we are standing it has spread over half a mile of bottom on the other side.

Once more, after many months of waiting we rejoice in the gleam of its waters.

The broad valley, which has so long been paved with white, is bottomed with amethyst now, the fainter reflection of the azure sky above.

The trees which have so long stood comfortless again see their doubles in the waters below.

The huge gray trunks of the water elms and the silver maples, the red rags of the birches and the delicate tracery of their spray, the ruby gold of the willows, the shining white of the sycamores, the ashen green of the poplars and the dark crimson of the wild rose and the red osier dogwood,--all these are reflected as from a vast mirror.

There is not a ripple on the surface.

But anon a belated ice floe comes down the main channel and shows how swiftly the waters are flowing now that they once more move "unvexed to the sea."

There are still some masses hugging the shore.

One by one they slip into the waters and float away,--just as a man's prejudices and delusions are the last to leave him after the light of truth and the warmth of love have set his soul free from the bondage of error and wrong.

The stillness is a marked contrast to the recent roar of the winds.

You may hear your watch ticking in your pocket.

The leisurely tapping of a downy woodpecker sounds like the ticking of a clock in a vast ancestral hall.

You may actually hear a squirrel running down a tree, twenty rods away.

He paws out an acorn and begins to eat.

The noise of your footstep seems like a profanation of holy ground.

Also it disturbs the squirrel who scurries up to the topmost twigs of an elm nearly a hundred feet high.

With a glass you may see his eyes shine as he watches you.

His long red tail hangs down still and straight and there is not breeze enough, even up there, to stir it.

Gnats and moths flit in the soft sunlight and spiders run over tree trunks while their single shining lines of silk are stretched among the hazel.

Anon the bird chorus breaks out, full and strong.

The winter birds report all present but there are a number of new voices, especially the warble of the robin, the tremulous, confiding "sol-si, sol-si" of the bluebird and the clear call of the phoebe.

The robins are thick down in the birch swamps, on the islands among the last year's knot-weed.

You may tell them at a distance by their trim, military manner of walking, and if you wish you may get close enough to them to take their complete description.

And, by the way, how many can describe this common bird, the color of his head and bill, his back and tail, and the exact shade of his breast.

Is there any white on him, and if so, where?

After the ice is out of the rivers the bird-lover is kept busy.

In the early sunny morning the duet of the robins and the meadow larks is better than breakfast.

March usually gives us the hermit thrush and the ruby-and golden-crowned kinglets; the song, field, fox, white throated, Savannah and Lincoln sparrows; the meadow lark, the bronzed grackle and the cowbird; the red-winged, the yellow-head and the rusty blackbirds; the wood pewee and the olive-sided flycatcher; the flicker and the sap-sucker, the mourning dove and several of the water fowl.

Last week--the first week in March--a golden eagle paused in his migration to sit awhile on a fence post at the side of a timber road.

Two men got near enough to see the color of his feathers and then one of them, with a John Burroughs instinct, took a shot at him.

He missed; there was a spread of the great wings and the big bird resumed his journey northward.

* * * * * By the shallow creek which ripples over the many-hued gravel there is much of interest.

The frog sits on the bank as we approach and goes into the water with a splash.

In the quiet little bayous the minnows are lively, and tracks upon the soft mud show that the mink has been watching them.

A pile of neatly cleaned clam shells is evidence that the muskrat has had a feast.

There is a huge clam, partly opened, at arm's length from the shore.

We fish it out and pry it open farther;

out comes the remains of the esculent clam, and we almost jump when it is followed by a live and healthy crawfish.

It never pays to be a clam.

It is very meet, right, and the bounden duty of every quadruped, biped and decapod to prey upon the clam.

Farther down is a sandy hollow which was deep under water in the great January freshet.

That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species.

They lie so thick they may be taken up by the shovelful.

Two or three dead fish are also found.

What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here about a hundred million years from now!

In March the rains and the melting of the "robin snows" soften the leathery lichens and their painted circles on the trees and rocks vary from olive gray and green to bright red and yellow.

They revel in the moist gray days.

And the mosses which draw a tapestry of tender velvet around the splintered rocks in the timber quarries and strangely veil the ruin of the fallen forest kings,--how much they add to the beauty of the landscape in the interval between the going of the snow and the coming of the grass!

The rich dark green of the common hair-cap clothes many a bank with beauty, the dense tufts of the broom moss hide the ruin and assuage the grief where an exalted forest monarch has been cast down by the storm.

The silvery Bryum shows abundantly on the sandy fields and the thick green velvet mats of the Anomodon creep up the bases of the big water elms in the swamps.

The delicate branchlets of the beautiful fern moss are recompense for a day's search, and the bright yellow-green Schreber's Hypnum, with its red stems, is a rich rug for reluctant feet.

The moist rocks down which the water trickles into the ravine below are stained green and orange by the glossy Entodon.

These patient mosses cover wounds in the landscape gently as tender thoughts soothe aching voids left by the loss of those we love.

They lead us into the most entrancing bits of the woodland scenery--shaded rills, flowing springs, dashing cascades, fairy glens, and among the castellated rocks of the dark ravines.

Their parts are so exquisitely perfect, almost they persuade the nature-lover to degenerate into a mere naturalist, walking through the woods seeing nothing but sporophytes through his lens, just as a rare book sometimes causes the bibliophile to become a bibliomaniac, reading nothing but catalogues.

It is a credit to be a bibliomaniac provided one is a bibliophile as well.

And the best moss naturalists are they whose hearts respond to the enthusiasm in Ruskin's closing paragraphs of _Leaves Motionless_.

* * * * * The yielding odorous soil is promiseful after its stubborn hardness of winter months and we watch it eagerly for the first herbaceous growth.

Often this is one of the fern allies, the field horsetail.

The appearance of its warm, mushroom-colored, fertile stems is one of the first signs of returning spring, and its earliest stems are found in dry sandy places.

The buds containing its fruiting cones have long been all complete, waiting for the first warm day, and when the start is finally made the tubered rootstocks, full of nutriment, send up the slender stem at the rate of two inches a day.

During the last week in the month, when the dark maroon flowers of the elm and the crimson blossom of the red maples are giving a ruddy glow to the woods with the catkins of the cotton-woods, the aspens and the red birches adding to the color harmony, we shall look for the fuzzy scape of the hepatica, bringing up through the leaf carpet of the woods its single blue, white or pinkish flower, closely wrapped in warm gray furs.

At the same time, perhaps a day or two earlier, the white oblong petals of the dwarf trillium, or wake-robin, will gleam in the rich woods.

And some sunny day in the same period we shall see a gleam of gold in a sheltered nook, the first flower of the dandelion.

A few days later and the light purple pasque-flower will unfold and gem the flush of new life on the northern prairies.

Even should the last week of the month be unseasonably cold we shall not have long to wait.

Yet _"----a little while And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and growth; a thousand forms shall rise From these dead clods and chills, as from low burial graves, Thine eyes, ears,--all thy best attributes,--all that takes cognizance of natural beauty, Shall wake and fill.

Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the delicate miracles of earth Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers;

With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs--the flitting bluebird;

For such scenes the annual play brings on."

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