Rain and a Duck and a Horizon by Stanley Johnson ONE morning I got up and looked across the valley up at the mountains and said, "It's come." There was a thin whitish streak of mist across the horizon, and above and beyond it the steel blue dome of a somber sky pressed down like a trench helmet. In the fields the corn stood shocked like Indian wigwams. Plowed ground lay bare. The air was crisp and cool and penetrant. The days were shortening days of blue and gold and rose. Goldenrod were in their last blooms. And on the mountains there the miracle had been wrought! Overnight some master hand had fashioned on every hillside patterns of scarlet sumac and crimson maple. One branch had caught aflame, and the sparks had scattered with the wind, until the whole world was like a smoldering brush fire. One slope was covered with a yellow bush; it was like a huge platter of beaten gold. The red maple entwined in it seemed great drops of blood. Blood and fire, flame and gold. . . . Brilliance framed in sedate hues of russet and amber and brown. Autumn days with the lingering memory of dead summer. . . . Autumn nights with the warning breath of unborn winter. . . Days at the end of summer passing in feverish haste, as if in the few brief weeks of Indian Summer must be crowded a whole lifetime . . . Withering leaves clinging so pitifully to their mother tree, not knowing of their resurrection in some other spring, living desperately while there is yet time. When I saw it all I said, "Yes, it's come." At the eventide of autumn, the night shadows creep close and the damp dusk hangs low. The tips of trees stand etched against a gibbous harvest moon, hushed and reverent, the yellow moon so near it seems to rest upon the mute branches. Through the translucent purple haze page FOUR a million stars give breadth to the boundless panorama. Straight pillars of smoke from burning leaves rise like sentinels in the darkness. Deepening shadows of rose and blue and gold linger in the sky, as if promising some strange new dawn beyond the horizon. Then come the autumn rains. Across the valley the rain-laden landscape culminates in a faintly white horizon and merges with a dull grey sky. The sky is brimming over; it is raining. Not big, beating drops, but a ceaseless, misty drizzle which has turned to snow on the mountains. The snow surprises me; it should not have come so soon. In the transformation effected by the rain, the flame of autumn has been damped and the color lost. Indian Summer, come and gone, now is but a colorful memory. The scene is dismal, yet somehow oddly beautiful. Continual beat-beat-beat of the rain and steady drip-drip-drip of the eaves give rhythm to the mood of the universe, a rhythm that pounds upon the senses with the maddening insonance of Congo drums. And suddenly I am sorry, sorry for those who do not see the infinite loveliness of rain in autumn. . . . I see a solitary duck drift by, low-winged against the distant horizon, with head bowed low and flapping listlessly its wings. It seems a tragic figure brushing in agony against the sky, yet I know it revels in the rain. It must be wonderful to be a duck, to feel clean raindrops strike your body, to fly through rain and leave all earthly things, all nether dreams, behind, and ascend into an infinite region of mournful beauty and dull grey lovely raindrops! To wing your way through rain, bound straight for melancholy darkness! . . . Into rain and darkness and autumn. . . . . . . The duck wings ever onward, passing from vision, crossing the rain's horizon But still it bears its bondage to the rain; still it seeks its destiny. Should that duck be killed today, it is no matter. A duck is nothing. Who cares for such a thing, such a lowly creature whose only love is the rain? If someone were to think me a duck and place a decoy and draw me down and shoot me, that would not matter, either. There is an ending sometime; there is an unknown crossing. What lies beyond may be revealed by the rain in autumn, when everything falls in true perspective. Life and death and rain (and once there was a duck in it, too) are all mixed up and they seem but a vision, but a reflection, of the mournful loneliness that lies beyond the horizon in the dark places of the earth. Night comes on and it gets darker and darker. I think the rain is most beautiful at night. It gets dark and soon you can't see it, and all you know is that it makes a strange lovely splashing sound and beats against the roof interminably like a tattoo of fury on savage drums. Or perhaps it is loveliest in the morning when I first wake up. It is early, and the day has not yet come. Only dawn. And I look across the fields to the mountains and to the sky and say, "God is kind. He made the rain still fall." Often have I risen in the grey dawn and gone tramping mile on mile through the rain, exultant to feel it throbbing against my face and beating in little puddles at my feet. Rain is a horizon, unencompassed yet self-enclosing. Somewhere within it are the hidden meanings of the world. It is unconquered yet. But into it and beyond it flies the duck, knowing strange things, knowing why men give their own souls for soulless things, and why they do not love the rain and deep night. . . . Autumn, when days of ecstasy and nights of passion become but a dimly remembered dream in the endless caravan of other nights and other days . . . and clear streams, blue skies, rose and purple sunsets . . . wild carefree days, thrilling nights . . . dead leaves and dying grass, shocked corn and smoke rising straight . . . loveliness and loneliness . . . autumn, then one more spring, one more dawn, one new day beyond a new horizon. . . . Rain, and ducks, and distant horizons . . . and living, and dying, and all those things. . . . page FIVE