The Rural Life Read online

  On the joy of reading Verlyn Klinkenborg’s

  The Rural Life

  “The freshness and delight of The Rural Life are in the pose of canny innocence, of seeing old things sideways and new.… This is a lovely, intimate chronicle, full of humor, wisdom, and poetry about country living and the concrete pleasures of tending and gardening for which our hands and hearts yearn.”

  —Ron Hansen, America

  “Klinkenborg’s vision is far sharper than that of any hawk that might circle the fields of his small upstate New York farm. He sees not only the minute detail, but the link that defines its place in the wider and timeless world to which it belongs.… Klinkenborg doesn’t just tap a fine literary tradition. He adds to it.… He is a master wordsmith. The paragraphs he turns out boast the diamond-like glitter of the perfectly chosen word or phrase.”

  —Mike Vogel, Buffalo News

  “Klinkenborg is disciplined and wary, a writer of hyper focus who uses the essay form to see beyond himself.… These essays offer many pleasures, but the greatest is in the language, in the building of embodied sentence upon embodied sentence as Klinkenborg leads us to an image that surprises with its rightness.”

  —Tommy Hays, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “The Rural Life speaks in a voice that is individual without being unusual. Klinkenborg eschews exhibitionism; he disdains glitter, more interested in delivering clear and just impressions than in outlining them in neon. He is a disciplined appreciator.”

  —Fred Chappell, World & I

  “There is an elastic, supple, inclusive quality to Klinkenborg’s prose. Without rushing headlong anywhere, it manages to connect the most unexpected dots.… The Rural Life is arresting, even profound, forcing us to look at the world in a new way, welcoming us to a new understanding of our place in things.… Read The Rural Life in small pieces at a time for the beauty of the moments Klinkenborg has thought to dwell upon.”

  —Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune

  “Exquisite.… Wherever Verlyn Klinkenborg goes, he captures the essence of the place in commentary that can be wry or lyrical but is always penetrating.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “It becomes clear that Klinkenborg’s essays are actually attempting something much more interesting than recounting a rural idyll. Rather, they’re looking at how the rural experience shapes men and women, how the land itself talks to you if you’re willing to listen.… The Rural Life is a book about life lived near nature, about the juxtaposition of wildness and cultivation that is the rural landscape.”

  —Sarah Stewart Taylor, Valley News (NH)

  “The Rural Life’s charms are so subtle.… The individual meditations are self-sufficient, each a little gem with passages so witty and insightful, readers will find themselves looking around for somebody they could read them to.”

  —Lynn Hamilton, BookPage

  “Replete with startling images and beautifully phrased thoughts.… The Rural Life sparkles.… Klinkenborg is a master at showing us the familiar in new and illuminating ways and has produced a book that can be profitably read and reread throughout the year, by country and city dwellers alike.”

  —Carole Goldberg, Hartford Courant

  also by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  British Literary Manuscripts

  Making Hay

  The Last Fine Time

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2002 by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: September 2007

  The Rural Life is a trademark of The New York Times Company and is used with permission. Portions of this book originally appeared in the New York Times and are reprinted with permission. The wood engravings by Reynolds Stone first appeared in The Turn of the Years: The Seasons’ Course, published in 1982 by Michael Russell, and are reprinted with permission. Engravings copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Reynolds Stone.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02932-2

  The Rural Life is dedicated to my dad,

  Ronald Klinkenborg,

  who got us all back to the country in the first place

  Contents

  The Rural Life

  also by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Copyright

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  To the Reader

  About the Author

  A Note on the Type

  January

  Every year about now, I feel the need to keep a journal. I recognize in this urge all my worst instincts as a writer. I walk past the blank books—gifts of nothingness—that pile up in bookstores at this season, and I can almost hear their clean white pages begging to be defaced. They evoke in me the amateur, the high school student, the miserable writerly aspirant I once was—a young man who could almost see the ink flowing onto the woven fibers of the blank page like the watering of some eternal garden. It took a long time, a lot of pens, and many blank books before I realized that I write in the simultaneous expectation that every word I write will live forever and be blotted out instantly.

  It’s hard to keep a journal under those conditions. It’s harder still when it becomes clear that the purpose of a journal—at least of those journals begun in earnest on the first day of January—is not to record, day by day, just a fragment of thought or observation but to herd all one’s days, like so many sheep, into a single pasture and prevent them from escaping. What drives the impulse toward New Year’s journal keeping is also the shocking realization that the only thing left of the old year is a few tufts of wool caught in the barbed wire. What I want a journal to do could be done just as well by a more aggressive savings program.

  A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life. His model is the amateur naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like Gilbert White or collectors like George Eliot’s Camden Farebrother. It often seems as though science in this century has little use anymore for amateur observers of that kind, that science has grown too institutional, too complex, to value the private watcher of a small patch of ground. It seems that way too when it comes to our own lives. They’re cross-referenced, indexed, cataloged, and witnessed by the public and private institutions whose job is to tabulate and codify us. Even the task of introspection has been jobbed out to the professionals. A personal journal in our time comes to seem less like a valuable cache of perceptions than a naive recitation of symptoms that the writer lacks the authority to analyze.

  But many of the great journals—I think especially of Samuel Pepys’s seventeenth-century diary and James Boswell’s eighteenth-century journal—are not marked by self-consciousness. They’re marked by a dogged absence of self-consciousness, a willingness to suspend judgment of the journal itself, if not of its author, in order to keep the enterprise going. The value of Pepys’s diary and Boswell’s journal is the world they depict and only incidentally the depiction of their authors. Their journals weren’t read until long after the authors had died. Both men wrote for an audience of one. Judging by my own fr
agmentary journals, that’s one too many. It’s not enough that I should be dead before anyone else reads them. I should be dead before I reread them myself.

  So at the beginning of this new year, I’ll try to hold out against more journal making. There are lots of good reasons to do so. I have enough to write as it is, and I know enough about writing now to distrust the words that seem to flow onto the page. A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It’s a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish.

  But if I do give in, this is what I have in mind. I want to count the crows in the field every afternoon. I want to record the temperatures, high and low, every day and measure the rain and snow. If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard, I want to mention the fact. If one of the horses throws a shoe, I want to say so, in writing, before I call the farrier; and I’d like to be able to tell from my journal just how many bales of hay I have squirreled away in the barn. It’s no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It’s the farmer—or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers.

  All of the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes—rebirth and genial carnality—have come and gone like a chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn’t turn into Sunday—and Saturday into Sunday—as it has for two weeks running. It’s time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it’s no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse.

  With the everyday, winter comes at last to the new year. In the country it isn’t necessarily snowfall or the sudden drop in temperature that marks the return of winter. It’s the sound of the plow-guy—unless you happen to be the plow-guy—clearing the driveway well after dark, when the dogs are already asleep, too tired from an afternoon of running around a snowy field to rise and bark at the scraping and banging outside. In the time it takes to wonder what the racket is, I remember. It was last winter’s sound, and now it’s this winter’s too. It seems surprising that the plow-guy even recalls where I live and that such a flimsy agreement—a couple of words and a nod over a rolled-down pickup window—could have such presumptive force. But that’s the nature of the country, where lifelong service contracts are formed in an instant and attach to the property, not the person, as newcomers discover to their interest. Getting out of those contracts is like getting out of winter. Better just to move.

  Winter’s own presumptive force made itself plain recently, with rain upon snow followed by snow upon ice late into the darkness. The next morning my footsteps to the barn through the slush the night before had been preserved with remarkable sharpness—each one a life mask of my boot sole, the splash frozen in midair as if it were a Harold Edgerton photo. In the sunshine, snow slid off the metal barn roof with a hiss, and the horses skittered out from the run-in shed, taking pleasure as they always do in a momentary fright. In a single night they’ve learned how to pick their way over ice again. The roads are suddenly full of the overtentative and the overbold, for at night the cold, clean blacktop looks like hardpacked snow, and sometimes it actually is. Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do. Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.

  Somehow it seems appropriate that the year should have ended with a winter storm worth remembering, a walloping northeaster drawing snow down in heaps from a solid ceiling of clouds. This was the kind of storm preceded most richly by anticipation, by the heraldry of radar and rumor, bringing in advance a seasonal glibness to almost everyone in its probable path—everyone, that is, who doesn’t have to travel. On Saturday morning the weather drew people to their windows again and again to see how fast the snow was falling, then to see if the fire hydrant had disappeared, then to worry whether the plows were coming. And as always when a storm of this dimension crosses the Northeast, what it brings in greatest abundance is a muffled hush, the sound of nothing doing.

  A winter storm is episodic by nature, whether it marches on an arctic track out of the west or rides upward along the coast from the south, as this one did, congealing as it comes. It’s been a long time since the last episode of this magnitude, and it was strangely reassuring, if only as a reminder of what true winter really means, since winter is now a pale, warm shadow of its ancestral self. Many seeds require a period of cold, called stratification, before they’ll germinate. Thanks to this storm, residents of the Northeast can consider themselves properly stratified.

  In the country the storm meant a chance, when the gusts were strongest, to pretend that we’d been shifted northward in latitude to the shores of Baffin Bay, or backward in time to the middle of the last glaciation, when ice sheets rumbled southward across Canada. The snow skidded around the compass with the wind, and though the storm never reached the blizzard conditions forecasters predicted, it was strong enough at times to blot out the dark edge of the forest, to erase stone walls, to weigh down the hemlocks, giving them a more pendulous motion than they usually have. The falling and blowing snow stole color right out of the air, turning a cardinal in a mock-orange bush into an indistinct rose-gray blob. By nightfall the snow in the fields was fox-deep.

  Every evening just at dusk I carry two hay bales into the middle pasture. One goes into the high feed bunk, the other into the feeder just below it. Each bale is bound by two strings of sisal baling twine. I cut the strings near their knots, which were tied by a mechanical baler sometime late last summer in a Massachusetts hay field. The bale springs apart, and the hay falls into flakes. I coil the strings into a neat loop and put them in my pocket. There’s at least one coil of twine in every jacket I own and another in the hip pocket of every pair of jeans. On this place, baling twine is the thread of life.

  Not that it gets used for much. It ties down tarps and ties up tomato vines and rose canes. It piles up day by day in an empty grain sack or a cardboard box in the barn. The horses are easier to catch with a double length of twine-string, as my farming cousins called it, than with a proper halter, and the horses are also gentle enough to be led that way. I know ranch hands in Wyoming who never ride out without a loop of the stuff—usually the orange plastic kind—knotted to a saddle-string or a D-ring. It’s hard to describe the emergency that a length of baling twine would fix, but you’d know it if you ever rode into one.

  And yet this is the common stuff that gives rural life its substance, a token of what divides this way of living from any other, a reminder of what comes next, what comes every day. Coiling those sisal strands is one of the rewards of doing chores, as is standing among the horses while they crowd together and begin pulling hay from the feeders. The brown horses are mole-dark in their winter coats now, and the dapple-gray mare called Adeline looks ghostly white. Their long hair makes their ears seem especially small, and that makes them all look attentive, though they spend most of the day dozing broadside to the sun’s low rays.

  If you live with horses, you soon get used to the feel of a line lying across your palm and fingers—a rein, a lead rope, a lariat. It becomes second nature, what hands are for. You begin to feel for the life, the responsiveness in any piece of rope you handle, even a coil of baling twine, because when you work with horses, that line, no matter how stout or supple, is what connects you to them. It transmits the dexterity of your fingers, the guilelessness of your intentions. It becomes a subtle tool. It allows horse and human to moor each other.

  Recently the neighbors’ horses got out through a broken gate in the middle of the night. They trotted up the yellow line on the highway for a couple of miles, backtracked down a gravel road, and disappeared into the woods. We searched until three A.M., driving the back roads, walking the dirt margins, looking for hoofprints or fresh manure. The night was foggy and there had been no snow. In the end, the horses found us. They walked out of the trees and onto the road we had traced them to. They were wraiths until we
haltered them. Then they turned into their old solid selves, a pony, a small mule, and three aging, swaybacked horses, all footsore. And who’s to say what we turned into, standing there in the mist, clinging with relief to the lead ropes in our hands? The moon barely glimmered upon us, a knot of creatures on the edge of the winter woods, exhaling together, happy to be connected again.

  Snow has been falling all day long. The skylights are drifted over, and by noon dusk seems to be in the offing, the day so gray, so white, that the winter color of the goldfinches—pale as olive oil—feels like an overdraft on the eyes. Some days chores are barely that, just a visit to the barn and then back for coffee. But this morning the gates were deep in snow and the Dutch doors on the barn needed shoveling out, as did the deck and the path to the woodpile. The horses dropped sweetfeed from their mouths, staining the snow molasses. Three crows in the barnyard stood watch over their shadows, except that there are no shadows on a day like this. One horse had rolled in a drift, leaving what looked like the wingprint of a giant owl descending on its prey.

  On the way back to the house, I stopped to clean out the winter entrance to the beehive with my pocketknife. The beehive stands beside a white steppe that will be a vegetable garden one of these days, when April comes and the soil is black and fragrant once more. Yet there’s no better day to plan a garden than this one. The landscape has a purity it will lose when the snow melts. The geometry of each bed is perfect at this moment, if hidden.

  One mail-order plant catalog is folded open to its pulmonarias. I’ve dog-eared another where the hostas begin, and in another, from North Carolina, I’ve marked every plant that could grow in this zone, while lamenting the crinums and kniphofias that won’t. Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs lies open on the desk beside The National Arboretum Book of Outstanding Garden Plants, sources of inspiration and depression. Latin names skim across my thoughts like water boatmen on a summer pond—Tradescantia, Helleborus, Cryptomeria, Epimedium. But by afternoon, designs have begun to tangle, and the list of plants is far too long. The only sensible plan I can think of is this one: I’ll walk outside with a stick and draw my gardens in the whiteness, echinops here, ligularia over there, a Japanese pieris by this corner. Then I’ll sit by the fire while the snow falls, watch them all disappear, and start over again in the morning.