The Rural Life Read online

  Last year it rained all summer. Most of the garden languished, but not the potatoes, which love water. I hilled them twice with compost, and by late August each of the potato beds was a tangle of vegetative sprawl, a mass of deeply dissected leaves and contorted stems. No harvest is quite as satisfying as a good potato harvest. The tubers always come as a surprise, patroonlike and globular in their tight jackets. The vines make a substantial heap, and when harvest is over the ground is suddenly bare and freshly dug, open to almost anything next spring except tomatoes or more potatoes, which might pick up diseases from last year’s crop. When I carried the baskets to the house I tried to guess their weight, but the only measure that came to mind was a ton.

  I took a potato out of the storage closet this past week and noticed that many of the spuds on the rack had begun to sprout in the cool darkness. On the purple fingerlings there were only small buds, barely noticeable, but on some of the russets and plain white boiling potatoes whose exact variety I can no longer recall, the sprouts had truly begun to rise—about an inch long, pale as potato flesh, already weakly chitted, to use that strange old word.

  If the ground had been soft, I could have cut them into sections, an eye apiece, and planted them. And if I had been counting on those potatoes to see me through the winter, the sprouts would have been a dismal sight, a sign that the potatoes would wilt before long and that hunger wasn’t far away.

  It seems like such an insistent gesture, to throw up sprouts in the darkness of a ventilated closet that once held a small oil furnace, with thawed ground so far off in the calendar. Most gardeners are trying to temper just that insistence in themselves right about now, to honor the heart of winter for not being the shank of spring. I know I’m ready to sprout in the cool midwinter darkness. Snow is still falling on the garden, blanching the uppermost leaves of the leeks still in the ground. I look at the cherry tree I planted last spring in a corner of the garden and the memory seems very distant.

  The ruins of the garden are still just visible above the snow—the tomato cages I forgot to pick up, a single stake from the pea trellis, the bare rose spines, the denuded Japanese maple, and, under the hemlocks, a surprisingly stout spire of Cimicifuga. I wake up in the middle of the night and begin to take inventory of the things I plan to do once the snow melts away and the ground begins to soften. Then I remember it’s January, a month when only the potatoes are optimistic about warmer weather.

  If deep cold made a sound, it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater’s blades against hard gray ice, or the screeching the snow sets up when you walk across it in the blue light of afternoon. The sound might be the stamping of feet at bus stops and train stations, or the way the almost perfect clarity of the audible world on an icy day is muted by scarves and mufflers pulled up over the face and around the ears.

  But the true sound of deep cold is the sound of the wind. Monday morning, on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the windchill approached fifty below zero. A stiff northwest wind rocked in the trees and snatched at cars as they idled at the curb. A rough rime had settled over that old-brick city the day before, and now the wind was sanding it smooth. It was cold of Siberian or Antarctic intensity, and I could feel a kind of claustrophobia settling in all over Boston. People went about their errands, only to cut them short instantly, turning backs to the gust and fleeing for cover.

  It has been just slightly milder in New York. Furnace repairmen and oil-truck drivers are working on the memory of two hours’ sleep. Swans in the smaller reservoirs brood on the ice, and in the swamps that line the railroad tracks in Dutchess County, you can see how the current was moving when the cold snap brought it to a halt. The soil in windblown fields looks—and is—iron hard. It’s all a paradox, a cold that feels absolutely rigid but which nonetheless seeps through ill-fitting windows, between clapboards, and along uninsulated pipe chases. People listen superstitiously to the sounds in their heating ducts, to the banging of their radiators, afraid of silence. They turn the keys in their cars with trepidation. It’s an old world this cold week.

  February

  From a distance the woods in winter look monochromatic, gray with undertones of dull red and olive, as if all the trees were a single species. For all I knew, they might have been. Ever since I’ve lived in the East, I’ve wandered through a forest of gross generalization, able in summer to tell an oak from a maple and a pine from a birch, but unable to make any finer distinctions. Eucalyptus, manzanita, madrone, juniper, pinyon, even acacia—each of these western trees I recognize, but none of them grows native in the woods around me. What does grow here, I’ve been able to say rather grandly till now, are trees.

  But I awoke recently with a deep taxonomic yearning, an urge to sort the trees in the forest by name. I’ve found, for instance, that on the east side of the house I live in there are two pignut hickories, enormous, stately trees. Beneath one of them grows a hemlock, a reminder that hemlock is highly tolerant of shade. Until this weekend I had never turned over a hemlock needle and noticed the two white lines that identify it. On the rocky slope north of the house, there are more hemlocks, and compatriot beeches too, elegant, smooth-barked trees surrounded by their juniors, bearing tightly furled buds on the tips of their boughs.

  The old barbed-wire fence that surrounds the barnyard was strung along a line of black birches, which grow, the naturalists say, on disturbed ground and which have long since embosomed the wire and staples. Up the hill from an old railroad reservoir, there’s a stand of paper birches, on one of which a great sheet of bark has come unpeeled, ready for the presses. Still farther up that hill, in a clearing overgrown with brambles, there’s a solitary white pine, whose needles grow five to a bunch.

  That’s the kind of knowledge you carry into the woods when you first begin classifying—the fundamental keys that allow you to cleave one tree from the mass and call it Fagus grandifolia or Betula papyrifera. Perplexing as the woods can be at times, there’s an underlying order to them. Do the buds on a twig, or the twigs on a bough, grow opposite one another? Then it can’t be an oak or a hickory. Do the buds alternate along the twig? Then it can’t be a maple or an ash. Spruce needles are square and can be rolled between the fingers. Fir needles are flat and can’t be rolled. There’s something appealing, especially on a gray winter afternoon, about learning such basic things. Walking through the woods with these keys in hand reminds me of the summer I learned the stars. Night after night I sat up into the early morning, sorting through the constellations and deciphering their movement through the sky. It wasn’t enough knowledge to let me navigate the heavens, but it was enough to make me feel at home on Earth.

  The Sonoran Desert is greener now than it’s been in years. A lush winter like this can almost erase the impression created in other seasons, when the desert looks like a garden of striking specimens set out on a dull, barren plain. Autumn and winter rains have given the desert floor a presence it usually lacks. It’s no longer the indiscernible gap, the deserted space between saguaros and ocotillos and chollas, but a level green abundance of its own, flecked with blossom. All its life is now becoming explicit.

  The habit in the East Valley of Arizona, outside Phoenix, is to peer into the desert from its edges, to stay on the road—the overcrowded Superstition Freeway and its two-lane continuation, Old West Highway—and look out. From the freeway you can see only how distant the desert edge has become, pushed southward or northward by one housing or retirement development after another. But once you pass Gold Canyon, jumping chollas flicker past at seventy miles an hour, olive-silver, knotted with dangling fruit. On foot the desert edge is deceptive. There’s always room for another step, but it doesn’t take many before you feel trapped in a fractal maze.

  In the towns of the East Valley—especially Mesa and Apache Junction—the major icons of the desert repeat themselves again and again, as they do all across southern Arizona. Old saguaros stand in gravel median strips and xeric yards like crucifixes of loss. Landscapers
try wherever they can to recreate the silhouette of the desert, the shadow of heavy-limbed saguaros against jagged mountain profiles. The detail is lost, of course, if only because the astonishing pace of development in the East Valley is a means of imposing simplicity on an unforgivingly complicated and inhuman terrain.

  You can find the desert too in the subdivisions and trailer parks and RV resorts that line the roads north and south of the Superstition Freeway, places where Iowans who are fifty-five and older and their counterparts from Minnesota and Saskatchewan convene for the winter. Nearly everyone is here because of the ice at home. They come and go, a bonus army of retired men and women, seeking traction, a foothold. When they want to remember the feel of ice they go to the shuffle-board courts and watch the shuffleboard disks glide back and forth over the waxed lanes, as frictionless as time itself.

  Within the walls of these retirement parks, you can hear greater and greater Phoenix, the sirens and the endless rush of traffic. The sound still calls to mind a stiff wind blowing in from the desert. There are ironic allusions to northern lives—an ornamental push-mower bearing the sign RUST IN PEACE, or brightly painted waterbirds welded out of a shovel, a hoe, and the tines of a manure fork. But the desert prevails. Ceramic coyotes and their pups howl silently at the streetlamps all night long. Quizzical ceramic burros ignore their loads and lock you in a sentimental gaze. Ceramic Indian maidens bend low to the water and fill their unfillable ollas.

  The premise of the American West has always been that there’s another West lying just over the horizon, a place to annul the past, to reoriginate. That premise was never really true, but it was a way of making sense of such a vast quantity of land. Now the next West lies well within the circle of the immediate horizon. East of Denver, heading west, you almost hate to come to a ridgeline on the prairie for fear of what will unfold before you. First a lone outpost of houses clustering on a slope, still raw from the earthmovers’ work, then garrison after garrison of signature subdivisions closing in on Denver itself.

  For many Coloradans a kind of geographical fatigue has set in, fatigue being another word for a sense of helplessness. The old wounds—the places where a megamall or a new crowd of houses has replaced hay fields and pasture—don’t necessarily heal in the minds of some of the drivers inching through Boulder. The shock of the new doesn’t necessarily go away when the new turns less new. All around the fringes of Denver, you come across roads like one I took through Lafayette a few weeks ago. On one side of the highway, the old pattern of land use was still visible. Aging farmsteads, mostly shorn of their outlying acres, sat back from the pavement among mature windbreaks. On the other side, the bare earth was glazed with freezing rain falling on a circuit board of newly built houses, already hardwired for an alternate reality.

  I often think about some words written a few years before the Ghost Dance massacre at Wounded Knee, more than a century ago, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a Scots horseman, essayist, and politician. Graham, who had spent years in Texas, Mexico, and South America, was commenting on the Indian question in the Daily Graphic. “The bulk of mankind,” he wrote, “declare that a prairie with corn growing on it, and a log house or two with a corrugated iron roof, is a more pleasing sight than the same prairie with a herd of wild horses on it, and the beaver swimming in every creek.”

  But these scenes—the log house prairie and the wild $$$horse prairie and even those farmsteads near Lafayette—are now so distant in time that they almost seem to be the same place. In America we’ve learned to locate the meaning of rural life in the past, thereby dismissing it. That’s one of the premises behind the sprawl now girdling every city in this nation. Where asphalt-shingled houses spread across the horizon, it sometimes looks like the ash a prairie fire leaves behind. The houses spread almost as fast as prairie fire, but their effect is longer lasting. They are monuments to incomplete arguments, to false assumptions about economic progress and demographic necessity. The strange part is that those endless new streets and new houses almost always enshrine an idea of land use, of community, of living itself, that is already old and failing, an experiment that is tried and found wanting day after day.

  The use we make of one kind of land depends on the uses we make of all the other kinds. Denver and environs is the proof. If you turn the Rockies into a playground or, at best, an idealized wilderness, and if you reduce agricultural living to a vestige of an almost forgotten past, then you have successfully cleared the ground for paving the rest of the state clear to Kansas in one direction and to Wyoming in another. To speak from a rural conscience—to say, simply, that this is the wrong way to go about things, a way that’s fostered by a deep human venality, a willingness to be bribed into ignorance—is to speak from a place of silence where no one expects to hear wisdom anymore.

  Just now at home a certain winter weariness sets in. Every morning and evening I can feel the sun pushing back the margins of night. It’s a dull soul who hasn’t checked sunrise or sunset against his watch several times by now, struck by how early the light comes and how late it begins to go. But that just makes a day of heavy overcast and freezing rain feel all the worse, more of an impairment than it would have been when the sodden year was still shrinking. The rain falls as it has all winter, over ice and snow, as if to make a none-too-subtle point about the climate in this part of New York State, a point that those of us who live here start to take seriously only about now.

  The rain falls on frozen ground, and the barnyard looks medieval, a vile compost tea in every puddle. At the bird feeders it looks as though we’re running a goldfinch feedlot. Sullen birds shoulder each other aside and seem to squabble more than finches ordinarily do, which is constantly. The other day a mob of robins appeared in the lower pasture on a southeastern slope where the ice cap had retreated. They moved like shore-birds across the frozen turf, staggering forward and falling back, not just that lone bird—the first robin, sign of spring—but a herd, as though there wouldn’t be enough assurance in the sight of only one.

  I filled the horses’ water tank the other morning, and as I did a pileated woodpecker cut across the hillside with a cry of demented hilarity. On dry, cold mornings, the woodpecker goes to work at early light, knocking a row of holes in a hollow tree trunk, waking the woods from hibernation, raising the sap in the sugar maples. The pileated woodpecker forecasts nothing, as far as I can tell. It lives here year round, and its plumage doesn’t seem to change, nor does its lunatic cry. Before long, another woodpecker will begin trying to drill through the metal roof of the barn the way it did last year. It will sound as though the world were an empty fifty-five-gallon drum with only the bird on the outside, hammering away. The racket puzzles even the crows in the ash trees.

  One day soon the rain will let up, and the frost will leave the ground as stealthily as it came. There will be yielding all around and a sudden insistent adhesion in the barnyard. The urge to clean away winter from the corners of the lawn, from the deep shade beneath the hemlocks, will become irresistible. But all of this hides somewhere on the next page of the calendar. The good news now lies deep within the beehive, where the workers, their dead cast aside into the melting snow, have set the queen laying eggs once again.

  March

  In the midnineties New England winters had an old-fashioned rigor about them—plenty of snow and temperatures cold enough to make life before central heating look improbable. This winter has lacked that elemental sternness. The bitter weather that stupefied the Plains states largely bypassed New England, which has experienced episodes of balminess. Once or twice the mercury has dipped below zero, and snow has fallen, but to little purpose. What made this winter unusual was ice. In a truly hard winter, ice is something of a scarcity. It appears in all the predictable spots—on rivers, lakes, and ponds—but it’s often abraded by wind or covered by drifts. The snowpack in a frigid winter feels almost arid, and moisture is locked up tight. Not so this winter. Days were warm, nights cold, rain almost as likely as snow. Every a
fternoon the world liquefied a little, and every morning the world was freshly plated in ice.

  The roads weren’t the problem. Dead level roads are rare in New England. But during January and February, every parking lot or driveway seemed to be a catch basin for the surrounding hillsides, which meant that every parking lot or driveway was a sheet of ice. When the surface of the ice melted in the afternoon, it engulfed the sand that was spread on it the night before. Spreading salt, like tempering steel, only seemed to create a superior grade of ice. All across New England, drivers walked to their vehicles in a gingerly manner, clutching every handhold in sight, only to find themselves stuck on slick, level pavement, often in their own driveways. Some drivers tried to ease off the ice. Some tried to burn rubber right through to the asphalt. In a frictionless universe, nearly everyone would be irascible nearly all of the time.

  The ice was beautiful, though it’s a beauty most people had had enough of by mid-January. Out in the fields, where the hollows filled with water and froze over, strange vacancies seemed to interrupt the continuity of the landscape. In the rivers, the frazil ice came and went a dozen times. On Dublin Lake, New Hampshire, one arctic morning, I watched a stiff west wind stalemate the closing ice, the whitecaps freezing even as they blew onto a stiffening shelf of frost. And when a light snow fell, just dusting the driveway, it was almost impossible not to admire how slick and unyielding ice can really be. But now the moles are throwing up fresh mounds of dirt. Traction has returned.