More Scenes from the Rural Life Read online

  published by

  princeton architectural press

  37 east 7th street

  new york, new york 10003

  visit our website at www.papress.com

  text © 2013 verlyn klinkenborg

  drawings © 2013 princeton architectural press

  all rights reserved

  13 12 11 10 4 3 2 1 first edition

  no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

  every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  editor: jennifer lippert

  designer: paul wagner

  typesetting: benjamin english

  drawings: nigel peake

  special thanks to:

  sara bader, nicola bednarek brower, janet behning, fannie bushin, carina cha, andrea chlad, russell fernandez, will foster, jan hartman, jan haux, diane levinson, jacob moore, katharine myers, margaret rogalski, dan simon, andrew stepanian, elana schlenker, sara stemen, and joseph weston of princeton architectural press —kevin c. lippert, publisher

  library of congress

  cataloging-in-publication data

  klinkenborg, verlyn.

  more scenes from the rural life / verlyn klinkenborg.

  —first edition.

  pages cm

  isbn 978-1-61689-156-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  isbn 978-1-61689-171-8 (digital)

  1. natural history—united states—anecdotes.

  2. country life—united states—anecdotes.

  3. nature. i. title.

  qh104.k577 2013

  508.73—dc23

  2012048882

  table of contents

  Prelude

  * * *

  year ONE

  year two

  year three

  year four

  year five

  * * *

  Interlude

  * * *

  year six

  year seven

  year eight

  year nine

  year ten

  year eleven

  * * *

  Coda

  Appendix

  note to the reader

  Prelude

  When I was a boy—so these stories always begin—I spent a summer or two on my oldest uncle’s farm in northwestern Iowa. It was the farm where my father was raised, and when I say I spent a summer or two there, I mean it’s summer in all my memories of the place. The sun is hot on the cracked sidewalk leading down from the back door to the garden gate. The lilacs are long over. The grove is in full, ominous leaf.

  But in photographs from my father’s childhood it’s often winter on the farm, and you can see in those photographs that the farmsteads in the distance have been joined, not separated, by the snow lying out on the fields. In the mudroom between the kitchen and the back door of the farmhouse, there were signs of winter even in the summers when I came to visit—enormous quilted coveralls, oil-stained at the cuffs, hung by the nape on hooks, like headless convicts all in a row. I knew that in winter the mud in the machine yard froze into unbelievable shapes, and I imagined, though I never saw it, that in the animal yards a fog sometimes lay dormant just above the backs of the cattle and that in the low houses where the chickens and pigs were kept the body heat was often oppressive, too liquid, too penetrating to tolerate for long.

  On that farm were dairy cows, beef cattle, hogs, and both the laying and the cooking kinds of chickens. In my father’s day there had been draft horses and sheep and geese and a goat or two as well. In other words, there had lived on that farm, at one time or another, bulls, steers, heifers, cows, calves, boars, sows, shoats, gilts, colts, fillies, geldings, mares, stallions, roosters, cockerels, hens, pullets, ganders, geese, goslings, rams, ewes, kids, and lambs. To each of these a breed name was also assigned, and each came in a color that could be named specifically, too. Some of these creatures also had personal names or an impromptu moniker that singled out a uniqueness, like a twisted horn or a hostile temperament. Of all these distinctions I was unaware. To me, even the difference between beef cattle and dairy cows was confusing at first.

  But what wasn’t confusing was the appeal of these animals, their power over my imagination. Even now, remembering those days nearly fifty years ago, I feel as though I’m looking past the horizon of my own life and into a painting by Constable. In the afternoons the dairy herd really did walk up an elm-shaded lane to a small, heavily trodden yard where they stood, meticulously aware of rank, waiting to be admitted to the milking parlor. The door would be slid back on its rollers, and one Holstein—always the same one—would make her way up the concrete ramp, swinging her rectangular head side to side as she came through the doorway, and then stepping along the barn to her stanchion with all the gravity of a town woman carrying a hot dish to a church supper. The air would soon be filled with barn swallows and the rhythmic, wheezing sound of automatic milkers.

  Almost every day I found myself in a corner of the farmyard where the hog fence met the side of a granary. There, I could stand on one of the fence rails, being careful not to let my feet poke through to the other side, and I could look in on the life of pigs. Unlike the humid climate in the farrowing house next door, the atmosphere above the hogpen seemed to be filled with a molecular dust that held the light. There were bogs of mud in the low spots, as there are in every good hogpen. Yet this was an overwhelmingly dry place, the locus of an effete, hair-splitting rationalism espoused by thick-skinned philosophers who were also profound students of their own bodily comfort. The hogs lolled, they fretted, they batted their small eyes in the noontime light, they tried to convey their intelligence to one another, and to me, but failed.

  All the wood in the pen as high as a pig’s back was sanded smooth by their rubbing, which I didn’t understand until the first time I stroked a mature boar’s pompadour and realized that it was bristle. Cleanliness was a fetish among the humans in the milk room, where milk was filtered and cooled in a stainless steel tank, but it was no less a fetish among the hogs in the hogpen, though you had to look for it. Perhaps the cleanest spot on the whole farm—with apologies to my aunt Esther—was the hog trough between meals. Its inner surface had been worn as smooth as ivory, as smooth as the trencher of an ascetic desert saint.

  But it wasn’t only the animals I noticed. It was also the humans among the animals. I was struck by my uncle Everon’s fearlessness as he moved among the hogs, a fearlessness all the more remarkable because the hogpen had been represented to me as a terribly dangerous place. If a cow leaned too heavily on one of my cousins as he washed her bag before milking, he would simply thump her on her bony flank until she stood over.

  I, who had grown up almost solely among people, expected to see human responses from these animals—resentment, outrage, peevishness. I didn’t realize that the high disdain with which the cattle treated my cousins was a form of comedy or that the squealing of the hogs as my uncle moved among them was absurd self-dramatization. Do you suppose it was anyone’s purpose, let alone the collective purpose of so many human generations, to breed so much dignity into farm animals? Who needed the intellect of the pig—its radical smartness? Who would set out to engender an eye as calm and unjudging, yet so capable of reflecting human self-judgment, as the eye you see in the head of a cow? Yet there they are, reminders of how utterly interwoven our fates have turned out to be. Farm animals are the product of coevolution w
ith humans, or rather we’re the product of coevolution with them. They are twinned with us. The word that applies to our link with them is neither bond nor contract: it is covenant.

  Year

  ONE

  April 5

  A couple of months ago, I began getting up at four in the morning. I’d been reading a lot of William Cobbett (see Appendix), who believed that an hour in the morning was worth two in the afternoon. His idea of morning began at four. I don’t usually imitate the lives of the writers I read—who would want to?—but for Cobbett, I was willing to make an exception. Once, when he was living in America, he met a wagon driver who was surprised at how much Cobbett got done during the day. A born explainer, Cobbett said, “I rise early, go to bed early, eat sparingly, never drink any thing stronger than small beer, shave once a day, and wash my hands and face clean three times a day, at the very least.” The driver said, “That was too much to think of doing.”

  The dogs are thrilled to get up at four, because it means they can run around outside for a few minutes, have their breakfast, and be back in bed by four fifteen. For a few weeks in midwinter, I had the early morning darkness all to myself. The February sun seemed as lazy as that American driver. But week by week, the darkness has eroded, crumbling sooner and sooner every morning. And when dawn comes, the turkeys come with it.

  They slip out of the woods in the middle pasture, a flock of twenty-some birds almost every morning. Some days they scratch their way slowly downhill, stopping here and there to wipe their feet the way the chickens do, wiping and suddenly staring at the ground to see what they’ve dislodged. Other days, the flock pours down the hillside, making their way to the spot where we spread cracked corn for them. In the early morning dusk, they look like low, hunched shadows, but as the light grows stronger it catches the copper and bronze and brass of their feathering. They move more sinuously than I’d ever imagined, their heads no larger than afterthoughts.

  While winter lingered, it was hard to say just who was who in the flock. Spring settled that. I looked out in the pasture last Sunday morning and saw a tom turkey, fully inflated, bestriding a hen. He let himself deflate until he looked no different from the rest of his harem, who are slender birds. Then he blew himself up again. His body swelled and turned black before my eyes. He became globular. He turned blue and white in the face and red in the wattles. His wings fell to his side, and his primary feathers reached out to the ground. His tail fanned out and pivoted side to side as he shuffled forward, like a dancer in The Mikado. This was spring in all its glory, all its urgency. Then he trailed his way uphill toward the other male, and they dueled with each other as though they were dueling with a mirror. The hens kept after the cracked corn and never once looked up.

  May 29

  The other morning, I lifted a bale of hay from a loose pile of bales on the barn floor, and a fox jumped out from under it. The fox ran to the back of the barn and turned to watch me. It paced a few steps, uncertain, and then scurried under the door and out into the cold rain. It was a moment of pure transgression. All the old story lines broke apart—the ones about farmers and foxes and chickens—and just when the old story had been going so well. The fox had stolen a couple of our chickens. I had chased it off several times. It would lope up the hill in the middle pasture and sit on the ridge looking back at me, waiting for my next move. We hated to lose the chickens, and we hated the fox for taking them, but it was a conventional hatred, a part we knew we were supposed to play.

  But there are no stories where the fox sleeps overnight in the barn on a bed of hay only a few feet from three horses in a run-in shed and a big, campaigning dog in his kennel. In all the traditional tales, the fox keeps its distance, a playful distance, perhaps, always respecting the invisible boundary between wildness and not-wildness. But the other morning, and on several mornings since, that fox ignored the boundary completely. The reason was obvious. It was dying from a terrible case of sarcoptic mange, an all-too-common disease caused by mites that infest the skin and cause severe inflammation and hair loss. Foxes with mange die from malnutrition or they freeze to death. The night had been frigid, with a blowing, soaking rainfall. Even the driest den would have been insufferable, and so the fox took refuge where I found it, in a burrow among hay bales in a dry barn.

  My wife and I have been seeing foxes ever since we moved to this place. They skirted the far edge of the pasture at a businesslike trot, keeping a watch as if they knew that someday we’d give in and get chickens. But because they always kept their distance, they were platonic foxes, storybook foxes, with sharp muzzles and thick red fur and bushy tails and the gloss of wild health. They looked the way they were supposed to look, the way you imagine a fox looks. Every now and then, a fox would get hit by a car on the highway near our house, and one of us would wonder aloud if it was our fox and we would miss it in advance. And yet there was always another fox crossing the pasture.

  But seeing this nearly hairless fox shivering at the barn door, its tail a pitiful file of vertebrae under bare flesh, I couldn’t help thinking what a thin concept of wildness I’d been living with. The wild was where the archetypes lived, negotiating their survival. Each animal in the wild embodied its species, which means that it lived up to its portrait in The Sibley Guide to Birds or Walker’s Mammals of the World. And though I had a rough idea of how creatures died in the wild, I’d never come across an animal driven out of the wild—across that taboo boundary and into my barn—by the extent of its suffering. The fox and I looked at each other, only a few feet apart. If it had been a dog, I could have helped it. But even the pity in my eyes reminded it that it had come too close.

  September 23

  I promised myself this year that I’d cut the thistles before they went to seed. But thistledown is in the air and lying in clumps at the base of the plants. Bumblebees are working urgently on the few thistle heads that still remain purple. For a few nights last week the sky caught a late glow behind the birch trees on the hill west of here. The light seemed to lift stray bands of clouds apart from the soft opacity of the blue behind them, a blue that memory alone can’t do justice to. I go outside at night now just to admire how steep the temperature gradient has become, how the mercury seems to roll off the table once dark comes. Fall is here.

  As it happens, I’m ready for fall, for once. Winter’s hay is stacked in the barn. There’s nearly enough firewood under cover and more right at hand. The old roof, which used to shed shingles the way our dogs shed hair, has been replaced. A brand-new furnace glistens in the cellar, awaiting only an electronic twitch from the thermostat upstairs. The new chickens have a new house next to the old chickens in the old house, and they’re all secured in a fenced-in chicken yard against foxes, skunks, and weasels.

  But the readiness runs deeper than that. Perhaps it’s the suspicion, based on next to nothing, that this will be an early autumn. Suddenly the thought of autumn contains the promise of renewal I usually associate with spring. I have the feeling that a time of year is almost here when I’ll again know just how to do what needs to be done. The sight of a school bus on the road suggests as much. So do the hardware store signs advertising wood-stove pellets for sale by the ton. The very briskness of the air seems to invite me outdoors and to work.

  The temperature could well reach the 90s again, and summer could turn out to be deathless. The tomatoes may go on ripening for another month, or they could be bitten off in a hard frost tomorrow. There’s no saying for sure, only a lingering sense of expectation, a hope for what lies ahead. For now, though, I walk past the pig house and look at the two young pigs nestled in the hay, and I find myself thinking not how hot they must be but how comfortable they look, ear-deep in bedding. They peer out at me, trying to judge whether I’ve got the feed bucket in hand. It’s a narrow calculation on their part. They could get up, run to the door, and meet me at the fence. But if they stay where they are, piled next to each other, then nothing’s lo
st if I just happen to be passing by.

  October 31

  The other day I noticed that I was walking down to the barn again. It sounds like a strange thing to notice because some days I walk down to the barn a dozen times without noticing it. My mind is on the tape measure I left on the workbench or the pile of logs cluttering up one side of the barnyard or the way the horses watch me as I pass. Sometimes I get down to the barn and can’t remember why I came. I never worry about those moments because there are so many things I could have walked down to the barn for that I’m sure to find something I need or need to do. All the tools live there as well as most of the things, like lumber and machines, that require tools sooner or later.

  What I was really noticing that day was repetition. Apart from my trips to the barn, I’d also gotten on and off the tractor again and again, hitching up implements, opening and closing gates. Having grown up, like most Americans, in several different places, I often wonder what it would be like to live your life in just one place. It would mean, among other things, a depth of repetition I can barely imagine, and with it an attention to a subtlety of change that I can also barely imagine. When my wife and I first moved to this small farm, five years ago, I marveled almost every day at where we were and how we lived. It happens less than it used to, but when it does I feel like I’m walking along beside myself through a deep tunnel of habituation. Everything seems so familiar—the sugar maples and hickories, the brambles edging their way up from the rail fences, the steel fence posts leaning against the south face of the barn. It leaves me wondering how deep the reverie of living in only one place might really go—something I’ll never know.