The Rural Life Read online

  It’s been as ugly here as open, undisturbed country ever gets. One day early last week the temperature reached forty-seven in the afternoon, with steady rain. The ground was frozen and still partly covered by snow, which had turned porous and grainy. A dense vapor clung to the tops of the snowbanks. Water ran in thin, scalloped rivulets across tarred roads. It streamed across the earth and pooled in every depression, where it stayed because it had nowhere to go. In every ditch, every hollow, a cold, sepia brew of last year’s leaves was steeping in a basin of discolored ice. I found myself staring into the tangled woods, wondering why humans had never learned to hibernate and whether it was too late to think again.

  There’s a limit to how ugly Manhattan gets in that kind of weather. The light can only fail so far in the rain before buildings begin to glisten. The city never feels quite so immense or so familiar as when the fog closes in. But on a cold, wet night here on the edge of the woods, the opacity is shocking. This isn’t the deep sky darkness of December or January, when the emptiness of space seems to reach right down to the horizon. This feels like some suffocating, damp antithesis.

  And still, a few days ago the ground was frozen solid. On late October mornings, when the grass suffers a brittle frost, the earth remains soft, though you can feel it tightening underfoot. Now conditions were reversed. In the fields the long grass looked like Ophelia’s hair, caught by the current in which she drowned. Yet there was nothing pliant about the earth to which it was rooted. No give at all.

  On Thursday, all at once, the soil would take the print of a foot. Not a deep print. As I walked I could feel a thin layer of soil sliding over the frostbound dirt beneath it, like the flesh of the forehead over the skull. By the weekend walking was treacherous, mud over shoes in the wet spots. On drier ground there was suddenly a remarkable sense of leniency. The soil felt almost buoyant, like a gymnast’s mat. It invited a fall.

  You often hear mud season reviled up here, though no one really misses a bitter winter like this one now passing into memory. In these tentative days at the end of February and the start of March, people talk as though the snow were simply in remission. But when the frost starts to go out of the ground, when even a day with heavy fog holds the light longer than a clear day in late December, I realize that I’ve thought of winter all along as the still point in the rotation of the seasons. Well, nothing is still any longer. This corner of the planet is melting, and we’ll be up to the axles in it any day now.

  When the snow went away—in a rush, just as it came—it left behind the lawn, the garden, the pastures, the barnyard. It also left behind locust pods, fallen branches, last fall’s leaves, snowplow scrapings, mire, and muck—the debris of a disordered season. The snow’s erasure has itself been erased. Everything is matted to the earth or anchored in the mud except the ridges an eastern mole has made while tunneling round and round. The early bulbs seem desperate just now. Nothing else catches the hint of spring from them.

  Yet the woods look no more disordered than they ever do. Chaos is always thriving just beyond the tree line. Downed limbs wrestle with understory thatch. Birches whose crowns snapped in high wind this winter stand rigid, wounds bright, crowns still waiting for the next high wind to force them all the way to the ground. Somehow that indiscriminate tangle, the mass of all that bare timber, makes spring seem like a betting proposition at best.

  I know that there’s an underlying order in the woods. What makes it hard to see is its intricacy and its time scale. Any number of interlocking communities dwell in what the eye sums up as a single disarray. All those metabolisms, cross-conspiring, begin to slip out of dormancy about now. The slow fires of decomposition and new growth begin to burn with equal energy. One of the ways to see the order in the woods is to look not at the stands of hemlock or white pine or at the indiscriminate saplings springing up in an abandoned field. The way to see it is to look at the gaps in even the most knotted vegetation. I imagine each of those gaps—the hollow under a bank of snow-matted goldenrod, for instance—as an ecological niche, whose occupants go unseen, who live and die in their own time, unconnected to mine.

  That’s an optimistic outlook, though it may not sound like it. Gardening at the edge of wildness, I’m able to impose order on nature only so far—a few hundred feet from the house at best. The horses help. They keep the pastures clean-limbed. They like a clear line of sight as much as I do. But in the garden itself—that one word standing in mid-March for a string of murky beds and bare dirt—the purpose is to create a reordering of the wild order, a place of redistributed complexity with an overlying, plainly perceptible simplicity. It will always take imagination to see it at this time of year.

  Meanwhile there are all those pods from the honey locust tree. They’re lying everywhere, curved, gloss-brown slivers a foot long. People say that cattle love to eat ground-up locust pods. Living in the country you learn to spend money in the meanest ways, and you also learn the most extravagant parsimony. I’m going to rake up all those pods this weekend. I won’t be able to burn them or compost them or throw them away. The thought that cattle would eat them will haunt me until I end up getting cattle.

  To northern gardeners, this time of year is full of anxious pleasure. Even as they daydream about the botanical pleasures of June and July, ordinary mortals find themselves nearly defeated by the gardening deadlines that pass so swiftly in March. Extraordinary mortals—whose seeds arrived two months ago, whose windows are now full of seedlings, and who are ready to sow peas and carrots the instant the soil thaws—will suffer torments of their own when the perfections they’re planning somehow fail to germinate or blossom. A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil. It would be too much to bear if nature didn’t temper a gardener’s ambition or laziness with her own unsolicited abundance.

  March has been oscillating wildly. One day the horses were lying on bare earth in the warm afternoon sun. The next day they stood with their rumps into a wind that was blotting the tree line with horizontal snow. Five inches fell, and again it was possible to follow coyote tracks across a field to a spot where the coyote had dug out a vole. At the edge of a small stream, a weasel had left muddy footprints where it climbed the snowy bank.

  This is the season when people with livestock begin counting the bales in the barn, wondering if they can hold out till the pastures green up or the first cutting of hay has been made. Farmers aren’t plowing yet, but at six-fifteen on a recent morning, I saw a farmer spreading manure on his cornfields, throwing clods and exhalations of steam into the air behind the tractor. The light had come up early—it’s the season for that too—and the very sight of that farmer at work seemed full of hope, a reminder that the soil will thaw, peas and carrots will get sown, and one way or another the garden will grow.

  Provident rural residents are already at work preparing next winter’s woodpile. Perhaps it’s an unwritten rule of the season: stack next winter’s wood before you dig this summer’s garden. Or perhaps the splitting and stacking of wood is tied to the rising of sap in the sugar maples and the sudden appearance of sap buckets hanging in the woods. There’s a keen moral pleasure in knowing that firewood split and stacked and sheltered from the weather in March will burn with abandon in November. Less provident rural residents will buy so-called seasoned wood in September. They’ll be plagued all winter long with damp logs and dull fires. When the weather turns sharply colder, their woodpiles will freeze into a single lump.

  The lump of firewood beside our house has finally thawed, and an ant—the true harbinger of warm weather—made its way across the bedroom wall and down the page of a book a few days ago. If this time of year is rich in anything, it’s rich in expectancy. Everything in nature seems ready to stir, and yet the only thing visibly stirring so far is daylight itself, which is steadily undoing winter. Cold weather has kept the lid on the garden, and the few ambitious shoots that have shown to date seem to be thinking better of it. Ice returns now and t
hen to the small pond in a nearby field. The air looks warm, but it isn’t—yet.

  What remains most wintry still is the sound of the world at dusk. The chain saws and axes and hydraulic wood splitters stop their work, the traffic dies away, and everything falls silent. A dog barks in the distance, and a white pine creaks. A train rumbles by just beyond the hill to the north, and eventually the last freight car clatters out of earshot. Then, nothing. The nothingness is audible only because it’s just about time to listen for the peepers. They’ll begin some night before long with a few reedy notes, which will turn, all too swiftly, into uproariousness. Then it won’t be possible to remember the quiet of these nights just before the peepers begin. The night sky will suddenly look warmer, more intimate. Orion and Taurus—the winter constellations—will skid into early morning. Humans like to read their own reluctance into the seasons around them. But it’s a headlong world in the country, and though most rural residents are provident, not everyone is provident in quite the same way. Some people plan for the winter, and some people plan for the spring.

  April

  There are 290 bales of hay in the barn loft, enough to last four horses well into the warmth and the tall grass that’s coming. Every couple of weeks since late October, I’ve gone to visit two brothers who raise hay and milk-cows on a Massachusetts hillside. While the brothers stack bales in the pickup, they grouse about the weather and the calamitously low price of hogs and the six-dollar drop in the price per hundredweight of milk. I write a check for the hay—a commodity whose price never seems to fall—and, as part of the deal, I bring news of the weather in other parts of the country—the snow that fell in south Texas in early December, the high winds last month in Lander, Wyoming, the knee-high oats and the peach orchards now blooming in central California.

  There’s a refrain to these visits. The older brother, who’s in his early seventies, compares the actual weather with the predictions published in the Farmer’s Almanac. The younger brother complains in turn about the inaccuracy of computerized weather reports. I always listen to this singsong with a sense of irony, yet the weather report I want to hear is exactly the kind these old farmers deliver, based as it is on their keen sense of the difference between conditions on their hillside and conditions on ours, seven miles away.

  They told me last weekend that the frost is finally out of the earth, all but a crust, that is. They learned this while driving fence posts in a nearby pasture. The woods, they said, are nearly dry enough for the loggers. The brothers recalled that last year they had turned the heifers out onto grass by now and that when the two of them were young boys the oats had to be in the ground by April 15, though they haven’t planted that early in a long, long time. This is not the atmospheric science of air masses and isobars and NEXRAD Doppler radar. This is the weather in a world of outdoor labor, weather with a long human memory, where April’s drought or flood is still felt in August’s hay field, and for many Augusts and Aprils in the mind thereafter. By the time I feed out the hay I stacked last weekend, a year will have passed since it was baled, and my two farmer friends will be baling again.

  After I finished stacking hay, I took the chain saw down to a pile of logs that had been drying in the lower pasture for a full year, logs that, split and stacked, will dry another summer and burn next winter. The top logs were warm in the sun, but ice still clung to the lengths of ash and birch that lay on the bottom. Snowdrops and aconites had pushed through the brown thatch near a hickory tree and across the slope to where I sat on a stone outcrop, resting. It was spring, and it wasn’t. The bees droned in the sunshine, hovering near the lengths of wood I had just finished cutting. In this still early season, the sap that oozed from the heartwood was the sweetest thing to be found.

  If you let a leek winter over in the ground—winter over all the way till spring—it grows into a monster, a pale, thick-necked, grasping Medusa. The leaves will have dwindled to a few dry rasps. They may even have rotted away. But that white-haired leek head, thrust so obdurately crown downward into the loam, will not come up without the soil it has entangled over the winter. Shake it like a chunk of sod to dislodge the dirt, and the garden fills with white rootlets and the powerful, lingering odor of the leek that would not let go. To eat leeks young is a kindness to them.

  A few leeks remained in the ground from last fall, along with a clump of unbulbed Florence fennel and a broken row of carrots, one or two of them firm, the rest top-rotted. I had forgotten them, and the January frost had heaved them. I dug them all up. I also dug up hickory nuts and old plant labels. The garden fork drove tine-deep, and the soft ground was a surprise. I had planned to do a little probing in the warm spring sunshine, but I ended up turning over the whole of the upper vegetable garden, laying a clod on its side and breaking it up with the edge of the fork. Soon I was in shirtsleeves, reaching down to uproot deadnettles, which were already crimson with new growth. It was an old relationship being worked out all over again, the perennial weed and the perennial weeder.

  Just before the hard freeze in mid-January, we replaced a 200-foot section of post-and-rail fence. The posts had rotted, but the cedar rails were in good condition. They had turned gray over the years, and a lichen like the discolorations on a whale’s back had taken root on some of them. This is the sort of gift that an old farmhouse will sometimes give you—57 nine-foot cedar rails that look like something out of a poem by Robert Frost or James Whitcomb Riley. I laid out raised beds 4½ by 9 feet in the vegetable garden using some of them. At the moment, the ground is still bare and mounded. It looks as though I had slain and interred five giants all in a row and not yet erected the markers. So fearsome is the early gardener.

  On Sunday evening the sun seemed to have come to rest among the birches beyond the pasture. I stood in its prolonged light and considered the beds. I was impressed by their symmetry, their intent. Their geometry exposed the rise in that stretch of the garden, making the land look as if it were bowing to the southeast. The illusion of mastery was nearly perfect, except that instead of controlling a deep vertical column of earth, all I had done was to box in the top few inches of the earth’s surface. A spade blade’s depth beneath the corner of one bed, I knew, there was a rock as big as a subway grate. I could only dream that I’d eradicated the deadnettles.

  The earthworms and microbial life-forms commingled as always in the soil beneath the pathways I’d made, making pathways of their own under the rails, dutiful to their own purposes, inattentive to any of my superficial doings except when the garden fork appeared among them. Those creatures are not about to be herded into my corrals.

  “Nor’easter” is a word that people who live in the Nor’east get to use from time to time, as they did on Monday night. Even some of the hill dwellers of western Massachusetts and eastern New York find it hard to say the word without feeling nautical, without imagining that when the wind dies down and the storm settles at last, the yard will be filled with sea wrack and some surprising pelagic debris. But on Tuesday morning the yard was only full of snow and fallen branches—tree wrack. The plows worked the roads all night long, their blades throwing waves of slush into the ditches and striking sparks from the asphalt. Behind them came the tree crews and the power trucks.

  The nor’easter was a reminder of how disparate seasonal cues can be. The eye seems to read the year in one direction, while the ear reads it in another. The tips of the downed limbs in the yard showed the swelling and blush that mark the onset of spring. In the profound, wintry silence of Tuesday morning, the only sound was the distinctly vernal clamor of birds, a pugnacious, whistling crowd of finches, the distant cry of a broad-winged hawk. Red-winged blackbirds crackled to themselves down along the boggy edge of a snow-covered field, creating a strong, almost dizzying sense of temporal dislocation.

  A day or two before the storm, the dogs wandered into a neglected garden bed. Its surface was matted with last autumn’s leaves, a soggy palette of decomposing browns and near-blacks raised in curious mounds
here and there. Beneath the mounds stood new clumps of daffodils, righteously upsprung even under the darkness of six months’ mulch. Their spears had been blanched by the lack of light to a pale yellow, nearly the color their blossoms will be when they finally appear. Tuesday morning the daffodils were buried again. Once the snow had been dug away and the sun let in, the warmth of the earth beneath the stems was almost palpable, the soil itself black. That’s half the pleasure of a spring nor’easter: knowing that all that snow has fallen on an irresistible season.

  Let me summarize the situation. Daylight saving time has begun. Snow lies twenty inches deep in the upper vegetable garden, twenty-two inches deep in the lower one. The southern slope of the pasture, bare for a few hours two weeks ago, is covered in snow. Everything is covered in snow except the road, which on good days dries from mulligatawny to gravel chutney. Last week three inches of slush fell—as slush—and it has managed to remain slush ever since. The sun has gone down the woodchuck hole in the high bank by the side of the road and refuses to come out. There’s more light at the end of the day now, but that’s not where we need it. We need it in the middle.