Song and Speed

“By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.”

Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook”

Each June I think about Frost’s laments in “Hyla Brook” in part while I’m preparing, and half-dreading, to leave home and head to the steamy-hot forests of Vermont. For many years, exhausted by the school year, I, too, had pretty much run out of song and speed. By June, Frost’s brook has gone underground and the loud Hyla frogs have dispersed.

Here, I say, if we had Hylas, they would be in full shout.

I was away for almost two weeks and was really amazed by the amount of growth –especially of Devli’s Club and ferns– that went down (or went up, rather), while I was away. Cedar seems to have grown in her own right, maybe a tad mellower after her 13 days with two other dogs and after the removal of most of her femalia.

Frost mentions that his brook may “have gone groping under ground”. I’m not touching the “groping” business, but one cool thing I’ve discovered about ferns is that the individual fronds are connected by rhizomes, so sometimes when you see individual ferns at a distance in the forest, you’re actually looking at a single huge plant–sometimes ferns are as large as tall trees, but most of their “stems” are underground as rhizomes.

The Devil’s Club, too, has undergone a wild metamorphosis. Some of them, I swear, are higher than a basketball hoop. Turns out their productivity is related to the underground, too; unlike skunk cabbage, they need speed—water that moves by their roots, which is why they seem to thrive in disturbed and steep areas.

I wonder why we don’t call creeks “brooks” out here in the better half of the country. (I do cringe at “crick” though, so some of my underground Easterner remains.)

In any case, Hyla Brook isn’t just about the flow of water in June. It’s a reminder to be less sentimental (I think) and see things as they are (of course, it’s Frost, so that’s not so simple when he has just shown you both what his brook no longer is and what it presently is [n’t]). On that note, Cedar still looks like a late summer humpy. The one thing not growing fast around here is her fur.

A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Final lines of “Hyla Brook”