Eucatastrophe

Spring blindsides you every time

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There’s a great line at the end of The Sun Also Rises where Mike Campbell, the minor nobleman who has been bankrolling everyone’s drinks for the entire novel, confesses to his friends that he’s broke. “How did this happen?” they ask him. “At first, gradually,” he replies, “and then, suddenly.”

That is how spring happens in New England: at first gradually and then, suddenly. You watch day in and day out, sew seeds indoors, take restless walks in the cold, will the electric green leaflets on the branch tips to unfurl, and nothing seems to change. But then, one day, you walk outside and the air is full of barn swallows and warm light, primroses have opened in the garden like white stars, and the ground is warm when you lie down in the grass.

Yesterday morning, my wife and I piled the boys and their bikes in the car while it was still early, stuffed breakfast bars into their hands, and took off for Bradley Palmer State Park. Once the hunting grounds of the prosperous attorney for whom it’s named, the park boasts miles of trails through pristine wetland and woodland, not to mention a clean, flat road running right through the middle. We strapped on our running shoes and sent the boys ahead of us on their bikes, but hadn’t gotten far before I realized I had to run back to the car for my forgotten phone and its requisite bird identification app. I sent the family ahead and promised to catch up.

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It took me ten minutes to make up the distance, and therefore found myself alone for a little while on the road, flanked by stands of ancient pines, with the slatted morning light pouring through and striping the tarmac. Wood ducks, robins, and chipping sparrows called in the gold-green distances, and the air was crisp and fresh with the smell of cool water and new growth. How did it all happen? I grew up in the country and, for me, there’s a kind of peace that’s only possible when I’m in touch with the natural rhythms of things. That rhythm had suddenly accelerated into the fullness of a spring that, for all its predictability, registered like a miracle.

It was Tolkien who coined the term “eucatastrophe,” meaning a sudden and miraculous turning of events for the good. It’s the opposite of a catastrophe and, according to Tolkien, more closely descriptive of history, which ends in a wedding feast rather than a funeral. If, like me, you believe that Tolkien was right, then spring is a foretaste of the final eucatastrophe. It blindsides you every time, the sort of thing that catches the heart off guard and makes it vulnerable to beauty again.

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