The sound of Spring

Steve Barnes

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring… He was writing of spring in Paris, Hemingway, though not the one in Logan County, where he might have found something, anything, that would have kept at bay the sadness that seemed to settle over him in every season, eventually subsuming him. Perhaps the vernal flutter of a cardinal — the male of the species, scalding red — would have been anti- depressant sufficient to sustain him through those months after the trees had given up their leaves. France is home to millions of gulls and cormorants but only six cardinals, who answer to Rome.

To a writer who is no Hemingway — witness the length of the sentence following this one — spring arrives in Arkansas the day the General Assembly departs and the year’s first cardinal arrives. And there he was, a crimson courier alighting on an oak limb a dozen yards beyond my office window, pausing to preen until he was certain his hopeful message had been received, then flying away but promising to remain nearby, promising to add his voice to the chorus of robins and sparrows and jays and finches with whom he will share our neighborhood until the next autumn equinox sends them all away. Theirs, the music of the Arkansas spring and summer, melodies endangered by — progress.

“Spring was ominously quiet when I was a kid, back in the heyday of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,” writes Christopher Benfry of the insecticide that we — some of us — remember as DDT. Cruising with the windows down in mid-year, a city lad’s nose knew when the car had entered the Arkansas Delta.

As do so many other southerners of a certain age, Benfry recalls clouds of the insecticide being sprayed across parks and farmland and up and down city streets, the mist welcomed by vacationers and farmers and homeowners as salvation from mosquitos and like-sized creatures that tormented humans and savaged crops.

It was concocted in a German laboratory by an Austrian chemist in the late 1800s, DDT, and refined by a Swiss scientist decades later. By the mid-20th Century it was America’s default pesticide. It worked. Too well.

“You spray the elms with DDT to attack the nervous systems of beetles carrying Dutch Elm Disease,” Benfey recounts, in “The New York Review of Books.” Then, “earthworms ingest the chemicals, birds gobble the worms, and everybody dies. Robins die; warblers die; the bald eagle dies, almost to the point of extinction. Oh, and the elms die, too.” And the oaks and the willows and the pines.

The obvious segue, as Benfey acknowledges, is to Rachel Carson’s pathbreaking “Silent Spring,” an indictment of the pesticide industry, a corporate behemoth that, she charged, gave the nation, and the world, “a spring without voices.

“On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”

By 1972, a decade after “Spring” was published, the scientific community had sided with Carson: DDT killed pests, yes, but also wildlife — game animals and reptiles and fish and fowl. And elms and oaks and pines and people. Outlawing DDT eliminated one serious environmental threat but others persisted and still more have evolved. Naturalists of public and private entities are newly fearful of the peril faced by every component of the planet’s ecosystem, especially birds.

It’s April, the cruelest month in one famous assessment, though it was the final day of March that brought tornadoes and so much heartache to so many Arkansans, with five lives lost and almost incalculable damage to property. We thought we had earned an easy spring after winter’s polar vortex, which shattered records and water pipes and ravaged poultry pens and shrubbery. April in Arkansas reserves unto itself the right to keep the first hours of morning crisp, but the cold and wintry nights, they’re for later.

Thus, echoing the scarlet emissary of renewal, Benfey proclaims “hey, it’s spring. The forests are waking up, and so, if we’ve had enough coffee, are we.” He cites “A Cold Spring,” in which a suitably caffeinated Elizabeth Bishop delights in birds being “wound up for the summer,” and in the maple the complementary cardinal cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke, stretching miles of green limbs from the south.