ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703100014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: DISPATCHES FROM RYE HOLLOW
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
As far as I'm concerned, spring began in Rye Hollow on Feb. 27. I know, I know. That's weeks before March 20, the "official" first day of spring given on everybody's calendar. I'm sticking with my own view, though, because it marks the day I heard the first spring peepers in the bottom land below the house.
Besides, the date on the calendar isn't written in stone or anything like that. It changes from year to year. Some years it comes earlier and some later.
We like to take pride in how far we've come as a result of advances in science and technology. Still, we can't make a calendar that perfectly matches the time it takes our planet to orbit the sun, because that changes, too. Not by a lot, but by just enough to screw up our feeble attempts to approximate time. We have to throw in a leap year every now and then to try to make it more accurate. And even then, our calendar isn't perfect.
We might take a cue from our "primitive" ancestors who kept track of time by aligning stone structures with the heavenly bodies. When the sunrise appeared in the appropriate notch in the stones, that was the beginning of spring. At least their method for telling time had the advantage of being based on the thing itself and not on some approximation of it marked on paper.
We could return to keeping track of the seasons using this method, except that most of us have neither a ready supply of large stones nor much experience with using them to build monoliths.
Besides, we'd also need a clear view of the horizon so we might catch the sun when it first appears each morning. That could involve trimming the oak in the back yard or knocking down the neighbor's garage and razing his house. Real obstacles, yes, but the way things have been going lately, nothing that a little legal maneuvering couldn't overcome.
And, too, it's not as if we'd have to roll the stones on logs as they did in the old days. We could cheat a little. Come to think of it, I couldn't think of a more appropriate use for a bulldozer and a dump truck.
Or we could simplify things and do it my way: We could listen for the peepers.
Consider why most of us so eagerly await the arrival of spring. Is it because we really care about the exact moment of a particular alignment between our planet and the sun? Is it because we want to divide our year into perfectly equal quarters?
For most people, I suspect that the arrival of spring is special because it signifies the rejuvenation of the natural world, when the wild things awaken from their cold slumber, when the sun once again warms us and our part of the world turns green and full of life.
What better way to mark this time than the songs of the spring peeper? Though a little frog, about the size of a quarter, the spring peeper's call may be carried up to a mile on the night breeze.
Moreover, the peepers not only announce the arrival of spring, they themselves are a living, breathing affirmation of it. Not simply symbol or indicator, they are the thing itself.
They spend all winter hibernating beneath dead leaves and decayed logs. And sometimes, on the coldest winter nights, their bodies are completely frozen - which would be the end of life for warm-blooded mammals like us. Yet they thaw and emerge each spring as if they had rejected death. With their singing, life returns full circle, and it seems that the world begins anew.
That is why I say that spring began for me Feb. 27. Truly, could there be a better way to mark the season than this?
Calendars seem so unconnected to real things. Celestial events are real, but seem so distant or beyond our comprehension. And I'm much too lazy to move stones, with or without a bulldozer.
STEVE KARK is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for The Roanoke Times' New River Bureau. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.
LENGTH: Medium: 75 linesby CNB