The Things With Spring in Their Names

I have been going on walks around our farm. Robins accompany me through pastures just fuzzed with green. As a kind of game to gird myself for the rush of blood to the head known as summer, I’m paying visits to things with “spring” in the name.

The walks are loose spirals. Beyond the fence line, in a cedar grove where an intermittent creek has faded to a coffee-brown stain, the first leaves of Siberian spring beauty (a close cousin to miner’s lettuce) have appeared. I sample a few. Nearby are the growth tips of hedge-nettle, a mint family plant that grows only here.

I know this place well in all seasons.

I know how these plants, from such simple early forms, will rise and branch into a structured canopy, how white and pink flowers will appear and attract bees and flies and hummingbirds, how gnats will gather, how the hedge-nettle’s leaves will grow ragged with caterpillar holes, how birds and wasps and fruits and mildews and moths will, by autumn’s end, have played out, in miniature, a civilization’s rise and fall.

So, as I walk here in early spring, it is hard not to sense action in things that appeared lifeless a month ago.

Like the wheelbarrow I left leaning by the woodpile. It makes me think of that little poem by William Carlos Williams — how “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.” (That’s the whole poem. When you look it up, notice how each of the tiny stanzas looks like a wheelbarrow facing left.) The poem may seem inert, but it has made far more trips, carrying far more weight than my well-used wheelbarrow ever has.

I pay a visit to a gully with a spring. Water flows from the hillside. It will flow all summer. This is the origin of the word spring: a fount. From here, additional meanings have run forth. Rushing out. A leap. The season of new growth. The source of something. Elasticity and resilience.

It also means to become warped or split: a boat springs a leak (which could just as well spring a spring).

The Puget Lobe glacier left us jumbled sandy soils with plenty of pore space. The majority of our rainfall sinks right in and migrates underground toward the Sound. Things get interesting when layers of hardpan, another gift from the glaciers, force the underground water to pool or travel sideways. When erosion cuts through, as in this gully, the water reemerges as a spring.

Water moves a lot more slowly through soil than in a creek bed. A clearcut sheds water while a forest soaks it in. Think of the hidden reservoirs beneath us. Their slow release gets us through our dry summers.

Places with shallow hardpan demonstrate this. Trees cannot send their roots through the hardpan to reach the main body of water beneath. It is one of the greatest challenges for a Western Washington forester. The thin soil above the hardpan is flooded all winter and dry as a bone all summer. Few native trees can tolerate such conditions. (Western white pine might be the best.)

Nearby, I visit a grand old stump. A springboard notch is still visible in its decaying side. Moss gardens circle its flanks. If I had my microscope along, I could pull apart any chunk of this dark soil and find springtails.

Not quite insects, though they have six legs, springtails are minute and abundant. They are cryptozoa, along with our millipedes, pseudoscorpions and slugs, animals that depend on dark pockets of high humidity like leaf litter and the undersides of rocks.

Springtails are named for a tail-like appendage called a furcula. The furcula is kept tucked, spring-loaded, under the springtail’s body. It can be released at the first hint of danger, and the springtail is fired off like a cannonball.

Springtails have another strange tubelike body part called the collophore. It was once thought to be a suction device for prelaunch stabilization. Now, it is thought to be part of a springtail’s system of balancing internal water pressure. They are quite vulnerable to desiccation.

The subtle breath and action of underground water make me think of the ocean and what has been described as the longest wave in the world.

That is the tide. Twice every 28 days, during the new moon and full moon, spring tides occur. The name has nothing to do with the season. It refers to when the moon aligns with the sun (called syzygy) so that their gravitational hefts work together and the tides spring forth. The highs are higher, and the lows are lower.

Ask any ER nurse about a full moon shift. That pull is underground, and it’s in us too. Practitioners of biodynamic farming time it so their seeds germinate during the full moon. Root growth, in biodynamic theory, is related to the moon’s gravity, while leaf growth is related to moonlight. The two are on different periods. Grounding and flourishing converge and diverge in a complex rhythm over the course of a month.

Rise and fall.

That little poem about the wheelbarrow was written after World War I. Nations were racing to rebuild. A storm of politics and technologies loomed, and life for the average citizen was being reshaped on several fronts at once.

Could poets, with the duty to help make sense of a headlong world, keep up? Would poetry fade out in the modern world? Does poetry even progress in the same manner as machine technology? Would spring itself fade into obsolescence?

The red wheelbarrow appeared in a work called “Spring and All.” In it, Williams says, “No ideas but in things.” And he obsesses over the imagination and its ability to influence the world’s endless repetitions.

I like that the wheelbarrow is gleaming with rainwater, lacquered, perhaps mirror-like, or soon to rust. It’s something we’ll all reach for in the coming weeks. What all depends on that red wheelbarrow?