Our Nordic or semi-Arctic placement on Earth makes it possible for us in Scandinavia, and in corresponding northern lands, to speak of a summer awareness.
This kind of awareness, the desire for summer, is something completely unknown to those who happen to have been born in the tropics. To them there is neither the longing to be rid of winter, the desire to escape from it, nor the deep love affair with summer. It’s really quite natural. A person from the tropics lives his entire life in permanent wedlock with eternal summer. He doesn’t know anything else. Nor does he long for anything else. To that person from the tropics the very word, summer, doesn’t have a trace of the significance it has for us. When we think of Indian summer and summer’s end and create an image of that for ourselves, we generally think of falling leaves, the fire-like splendor of red-and-yellow-burning trees, the massive defoliation of autumn. We see those leaves fall in great heaps all at once, and the image of summer’s flickering undressing act is forever etched in our minds. And as spring comes around again we get the completely opposite experience: summer’s first modest trying on of her green negligee, which, after a few days of airy lightness turns into a solid robe of clothing, a round, billowy dress of leaves which hides all the protruding branches, all the curved, knotty limbs, all the gnarled witchlike fingers. We get to experience the year’s great dressing day during the spring and its clearly perceptible days of undressing during the fall.
That is not the way it is in the tropics. There the leaves fall every day year round, and new leaves emerge every day throughout the year. In some forests on the island of Java, for instance, the falling of leaves happens in a way that nobody ever notices. Almost imperceptibly a new leaf replaces the old one, which discreetly breaks loose and sails to the ground where it is quickly transformed into humus. So there the falling of leaves is identical to the exchange of leaves. On quiet days you hear something that sounds like careful footsteps up in the canopy of the rainforest. What you are hearing is the sound of leaf exchanges. In other cases involving different species of trees, an old-growth tree, standing alone among the others, may suddenly, and for no apparent reason, drop all of its leaves at once (within the span of a few minutes). The tree then remains naked for a few days or a couple of weeks before it is just as quickly covered with new leaves, and the tree, which you thought was dead, is resurrected in a few hours with fresh greenery, proudly radiant against the ordinary green of the surroundings.
These are a few illustrations of eternal summer among the trees of the rainforest. This topic is too large for us to heap on additional examples, but what I am trying to convey is that growth in a tropical forest takes on the characteristics of a stage play and exists on an entirely different level from that of the Nordic deciduous forests. The drama inherent in the growth processes is different. If the collective fall of leaves on a windy day in early autumn in Scandinavia serves as an illustration of the northern deciduous forest’s sudden step from leaf-cloud-idyll to winter drama, then the quick springing up from the ground of bamboo shoots in the tropics serves as a good example of what could be called the tropical forest’s rapid but confusingly diverse green drama. A new shoot of bamboo may grow more than half a meter a day (ninety centimeters has been measured in several cases)—but it is unfortunate that this phenomenon has gained such a sad reputation because of man’s inhumanity to man. I am referring to the old, barbaric punishment: executions by growing bamboo.
Sometimes it can be rewarding to sit down in the middle of winter and really become conscious of your summer awareness by taking an inventory of your memories of summer. I don’t mean memories of summer related to social life, like necking in the moonlight or going swimming, because these things are supposedly the easiest to evoke.
I remember when I was seven years old, it was wintertime, trying to recall summer—the very first thing I thought of was a flower called St. John’s wort, and I always imagined it growing next to a stile. There it stood, leaning toward the fence, and that for me was summer.
Water lilies I associated with death. Where water lilies grew you were warned about ooze on the bottom and the water suddenly getting too deep. In addition, the water lily led your thoughts to Näcken, the evil water sprite, and the image I had of him was of an old man with a wet beard, treading water. His beard hung way down into the water and he called out “Hoo-Hoo-Hoo!” with a tone in his voice like when the winter ice on a lake cracks, bellows, and hoots.
But as the years went by, summer grew larger. It became pussy toes on dry slopes when I tried to imagine a hot, dry summer; it became Our Lady’s bedstraw when I tried to remember July’s piercing, hot-sweet, sunny fragrance; and it became starflower, the slender, cool trientalis.
You can look at summer in so many different ways that it—almost by its own power—occupies and fills that room where your wishes for all of life’s riches dwell: great plains, whispering leafy forests, the grove strewn with lilies of the valley, and the lake full of water lilies, the forest lake from which the fog on a summer morning rises as when an old woman from the woods blows hot steam off her black coffee. You see summer woven together by grass and twittered together by songbirds. You experience the lakes just as they have forever glittered their way into your memory: like fantastic, mile-long mirrors of quicksilver. And in your memory you encounter, like a miracle you can touch, a sea of green-flowering treetops. You also learn to recall the increasingly luminous June summer of the spruce forests, when their new shoots turn the trees light in color, a Verona green that briefly gives spruce forests a radiance brighter than the deciduous forests. Not until the lilies of the valley are in full flower do the spruces once again begin to slowly darken. The spruce trees blend their shadows with each other and create a midday gloom rich with mosquitoes in the forest bogs, where the sharp and rough sedge sprawls, and where white butterflies fly away like pale shadow-flowers escaping your heavy footfalls.
But memory also holds a cultural landscape in the mind’s eye: fields of grain with their billowing blond waves and country roads that cut through them, hard and white like a sun-dried grindstone.
You are never done with your memory of summer. It returns. You never have to add on to it. Summers make their own poems; sometimes you think that they haunt you.
Execution by bamboo was carried out by cutting off a stand of bamboo at a sharp angle flush with the ground, and then placing the victim, strapped onto a bedlike frame, over the bamboo, which would then grow through the body.
In Swedish folk legends, Näcken was a male, water sprite that lived in rivers and lakes, often depicted as playing an instrument. His music (or song) was often thought to attract children and cause drowning accidents, and therefore children were repeatedly warned of staying away from water.