The Rural Life Read online

  The signs of spring are thrown away, like unheeded hints. Robins mope in the lower branches of a thick-budded magnolia, waiting for the worms of open turf. The red-winged blackbird I heard in a treetop the other day sounded, somehow, like an asterisk. The chorus of birdsong is entirely different than it was a few weeks ago, but to me it lacks an objective correlative. The tip of a single crocus would do. The house is full of seedlings, especially basil seedlings, all of them at the two-leaf stage, but hooded and mum. The horses are shedding, and it looks like bad management on their part.

  I spent a couple of hours moving mud around in the barnyard last weekend, digging shallow channels for the runoff, watching the standing water siphon its way downhill. I pretended to be reclaiming land from the Zuider Zee, opening polder after polder to damp cultivation. It reminded me of a wet spring when I was a boy in Iowa, a spring that filled the railroad ditches and flooded all the low spots in our end of town. As fast as the soil thawed, the flood drained away, washing the ditch grasses flat and releasing a raw scent from the earth, a lowland musk that must have pricked the noses of all the gardeners in town.

  When I had drained the last of the barnyard puddles, I threw a hay bale in each of the feeders and went around with the grain bucket. The sweetfeed shone like amber in the dark rubber grain pans. I stood and watched it glowing, suddenly aware of how weary with whiteness my eyes have become, how hungry for color more striking than junco gray. Hunger is the byword for now. On the bare upland stretches south of here, the twilight is crowded with deer. This has been a hard winter for them, and a harder spring so far. They’ll be ruddy as the setting sun before long. We’ll all be ruddy one day, if that day ever comes.

  Spring plunges onward, and yet the season seems strangely more patient than it often does here in mid-April. Perhaps it’s the long light at evening or the abundance of fair-weather days recently, but a time of year that is emblematic of swift change has offered a consistency, a duration, no one really expects. The grass has risen through old thatch and blossoms have begun to appear on old wood, which reminds you that spring is also a season for dividing the living from the dead—the plants that can’t revive, the leaves blown into drifts below the hemlocks, the old stems that won’t bud again. Everyone in this neighborhood builds a brush pile about now, and when the conditions look right, they set it afire, as though it were a pyre on which winter burned, the last purification before looking ahead toward summer.

  Before we bought it, our house sat empty for several years, so I’ve been building a Babel of a brush pile at the edge of the woods. Instead of burning it, I’ll call it a thicket and turn it over to birds and animals that like heavy cover. What binds the pile together are wild blackberry canes. What gives it body are the burdocks I’ve been collecting from the pastures. What keeps it from blowing away are honey locust branches too small for firewood. The branches come from a massive bough that fell from the parent tree some years ago, leaving a canoe-sized wound in the trunk. The bough came to rest on a grassy bank that was planted years ago with snowdrops and Siberian squill. It offers a contrast that’s almost too easy to moralize—a bough of prehistoric dimension felled by its own weight, while all around it bloom flowers that drove their way up through the snow nearly a month ago.

  The locust bough is about eighty years old. I’ve been disassembling it gradually with a chain saw and axe. One morning I sat down and counted the rings. The wood itself is an umber red, and the rings radiate from the center like dark ripples on a pond. The first time I tried to split a thick, freshly cut cross section of locust, the axe rebounded. When I came back a couple of days later, the disk had developed radial checks—cracks running outward from the center to the bark, across the rings. I tapped the sawn face of one chunk with the back of the axe, and it fell into quarters. Before long, there was a pile of firewood—sharp locust wedges—where there had once been a serpentine log.

  But I think I’ll leave one length of the downed bough intact, an impromptu garden seat of sorts. The bark is grown over in places with moss and lichen, a patchwork of deep wet green and pale dry olive, grooved and notched and ravined. I’ve been trying hard, like everyone near here, to bring out my dead during the last few weeks, to rake out the flower beds and borders, to collect the litter of winter. But some days it’s been too nice to do anything but sit on an old locust log, still unshaded by the tree above me, wondering about the season ahead, how it will flourish and what it will bear.

  I’ve been thinking about raising pigs. Ask anyone who knows me. Sooner or later the conversation turns to raising pigs. I have a shelf full of books whose titles include the words “pigs” and “successful.” I’ve even sold, as futures, the four quarters of a prospective pig to friends who have decided to humor me. At this moment in Montgomery County, New York, a sow is pregnant, or “in pig,” as the pig farmers say, with a litter of piglets from which I hope to take two in May, when they should weigh about forty pounds apiece. The sow and the boar who bred her are Tamworths, an uncommon, endangered breed, lean, gingery bacon types, good foragers, good mothers.

  What decided me on pigs was meeting a farmer who still raises pigs on pasture. “I have a pasture,” I remember thinking. What all this means is that I’m giving in to the logic of where I live and the land I live on. A place like this is always asking of me, “What can you do yourself?” I didn’t even hear the question at first. All I meant to harvest was lettuce and metaphors and peaches in a good year and, of course, bushels of horse manure. But each added layer of complexity—reseeding a pasture or keeping bees—points toward other layers of complexity, like pigs, that lie just a short logical leap away. I have no illusions of attaining self-sufficiency. The only sufficiency I want is a sufficiency of connectedness, the feeling that horses, pigs, bees, pasture, garden, and woods intertwine.

  The nineteenth-century English ruralist Richard Jefferies once wrote that “every condition of modern life points in the direction of minute cultivation. Look at all the people in great cities (and small cities, for the matter of that) who cannot grow a single vegetable or a single apple for their own use.” I don’t know whether Jefferies would have argued that if you can grow vegetables and apples (and pigs, for the matter of that), you should. But he did argue that instead of growing a single crop, like wheat or corn, it might be better for many farmers to grow a wide variety of crops on their land, to cultivate minutely, an idea that has proved true all over the world. The agriculture Jefferies had in mind was a deep biological complexity, not quarter-sections of soybeans.

  I’m no farmer, and the land I live on is naturally better suited to growing a little of many crops than to growing a lot of one. The economic argument for raising vegetables and apples and a couple of pigs is small change anyway. But the garden waste and the windfall apples will go to the pigs, as will pasture grasses and hickory nuts and beech mast and some commercial grain. Meanwhile, the pigs will fertilize the pasture and grub out the underbrush at the edge of the woods. In late autumn I’ll haul them up the road to a local independent slaughterhouse, which has a smokehouse of its own. I don’t know what I will think when that happens, though nearly everyone tries to tell me how it will be.

  It’s almost impossible to think about nature without thinking about time. In the country, time isn’t the fourth dimension, it’s the only dimension, and it tugs in an ancestral way that has nothing to do with clocks or calendars. Time in nature is both an axis and a cycle. But it’s also a jumble, a collision, especially in the way it works on human feelings. As Milton says of geese, humans are “intelligent of season,” and that’s a perplexing condition to be in.

  Last week, between New Lebanon and Petersburg, New York, Route 22 was an asphalt strip cut right through the natural year. On the highest hills, snow had fallen overnight, clinging to every branch. On the middle slopes, the trees that had begun to blossom looked like plumes of smoke, little different from the smoke that rose from burning leaf piles along the ditches. The Hoosic River had risen
to near flooding. In the deepest stretches its waters were thoroughly soiled, but in the shallows they had turned a chalky aquamarine, the color of oxidized siding on a mobile home. In the cornfields, filled with last year’s stubble, the first speculative tire tracks had been laid by tractors, which had then turned home because of the damp. Some fields were still covered with an autumnal thatch, while others had sprung so green I almost longed to be put out to pasture.

  If the first iris spears and the purple tips of lilac buds still seemed tentative somehow, the birds did not. Robins bombed across the highway only a few feet above its surface. Cardinals took a higher, fluttering path. Turkeys hoping to cross the road collected by twos in the ditches and then departed with a flight that angled steeply upward to end in a distant tree. Crows seemed to hop straight down from the sky to investigate some roadside carnage. From the marshes, I could hear the cackling of red-winged blackbirds. Down among the cattle and horses, which were shedding great strips of winter fur, the cowbirds had returned. The head of a male cowbird is matte chocolate brown, and its body is a deep, night-bright, iridescent black. Trying to stare at the place where those two colors meet evokes a memory that has no name.

  Inevitably I search for defining moments at this time of year. Is it the coming of dandelions? The tribe of vultures that gathers in the updrafts? The molting of goldfinches? The hopeful plots of bare dirt—future gardens—newly cut into lawns? In this part of the world each day seems to bring a different, contradictory season. But everything points to the first rhubarb pie.

  May

  In Manhattan the beauty of the night sky is only a faded metaphor, the shopworn verse of an outdated love song. The stars shine no brighter at midnight in midtown than the ones on the old time-dimmed ceiling of the waiting room at Grand Central Station. But sometimes it’s possible, even in Manhattan, to see the evening star—Venus—descending in the west, presenting her orbit, edgewise, to viewers on Earth. Venus is the luminous body hanging low over New Jersey in the early evening, brighter than any heavenly object visible from Earth except the sun and moon. Every night people go to bed wondering what strangely bright star that is, and then they’re overtaken by sleep. In the morning no one remembers the question.

  Sometimes you can almost picture the motion of Venus in its orbit, as if you were looking at a diagram of the solar system. Imagine a line between the sun, at sunset, and Venus, glittering high above the horizon. That’s the line of Venus’s orbit. When Venus moves toward Earth, it’s the evening star, and when it moves away from Earth, it becomes the morning star. The moment of transition occurs when Venus passes between the sun and Earth. As the year wears on, Venus appears nearer and nearer the sun, until the planet is engulfed by twilight, and then, before long, Venus will come back into view, at dawn. For now, the evening star—Hesperus, as it was anciently known—is a steadily waning crescent, no matter how starlike or globular its light appears.

  To say, as you must, that Venus is not a star but a planet seems ungrateful somehow, almost pedantic. That’s the kind of technicality Charles Lamb had in mind when defending his personal ignorance almost two hundred years ago. “I guess at Venus,” he wrote, “only by her brightness.” Lamb was no Copernican, and neither are most of us. We are little Ptolemies every one. The sun rises and sets upon us while the earth remains fixed beneath our feet. When you lie in a meadow, deep in country, late at night, etherized by the fullness of the sky, it’s all you can do to imagine the simplest of celestial motions: the pivoting of constellations around the North Star. To impart to each point of light the motions proper to it—to do the calculus of all those interfering rotations, those intersecting gravities—is simply impossible. It’s easier just to imagine that you’re staring at the ceiling of a celestial waiting room.

  Last weekend I woke up at four in the morning to the smell of rain. Perhaps it was a dream scent. Perhaps a few drops really fell, enough to remind me that the smell of rain is the catalyzed smell of the local earth and everything on it. By the time I got up for good, the ground was as dry as it was when I went to bed, a month dry, after a month without any precipitation. Dust rises from the horses’ hooves when they run across the pasture. Manure dries the way it does in Colorado, to half its weight, then half of that in a day or two. A storm gathered later that afternoon, portentous clouds, and then, as a neighbor with a computerized weather station reported, there came nine-hundredths of an inch, just enough to leaven the upper layer of dust. We have what might be called a big-gulp rain gauge, and it registered no such thing.

  A spring like this teaches people to see a prescience in nature, no matter how skeptical they are. All that snow lying so late into March and April turns out to have been lying there for a reason, to alleviate this long dry spell. Beneath a dry inch or two, the soil is still moist. Mud season lasted only a few hours this year because the melt came so gradually, a sign that the runoff was being slowly, deeply banked in the soil instead of being sluiced away downstream, down-ditch, down-gully.

  The snow disappeared more than a month ago, but I’m still noticing its effects. What remained of the vegetable gardens was mashed flat. In places it looked as if winter had gone through with a stiff brush and a bottle of brilliantine. Winter may have been deep, but it was also soft, and that seems to have suited some species exactly.

  The garlic has never grown so well. Nearly every flowering tree and shrub has mocked the memory of other springs with sheer proliferation of blossoms. A week after the snow left, I started seeing tiny seedlings everywhere—in the garden, across the lawn, throughout the pasture. They looked as if they’d been thickly broadcast by someone with a sure hand. Their seed leaves were dark green, but the first true leaves had a metallic glint that gave them away. They were sugar maples. Every samara that fell last year seems to have taken root. We now live in the middle of a forest that’s three inches tall. When the sun sets, it catches the tint of the seedling maple leaves and the pasture turns bronze.

  The oldest cottonwoods along the Bighorn River have fissured bark nearly as deep as my palm is wide, and where cattle have rubbed against them their bark is pale. Morels grow in the new grass beneath the cottonwoods. To hunt for morels is to remember something unsettling about the task of looking. One day last week I searched the partial shade of each tree along a quartermile of riverbank, and as I did I tried to concentrate on seeing the fawn-brown cranial effusion that is a morel. But concentrating didn’t make the morels appear. They were there or not there, and nothing could induce them to surface where they weren’t.

  On a bright day a few trout are visible from a high bank—wisps of movement against a dark green background, more angular and better camouflaged than the undulating filaments of aquatic weed that wash downstream. But to some anglers a fish is truly visible only when it rises and feeds. Sometimes trout shoulder the river aside, and sometimes they barely crease it, taking a cluster of midges sliding past on the water’s tension, as light as thought. Most of the time the fish adhere to the stream bottom, waiting, feeding in the subsurface drift.

  Until the fish rise I wait too. In slack current, rafts of goslings test the water, their parents, like tugboats, nudging them this way and that. Everywhere there is the racket of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds, the high-ceilinged squawk of pheasants, the wet slap of mergansers’ wings on takeoff. Green hills climb in the distance, level off, and become wheat and barley fields, private inholdings on the Crow Reservation.

  Then a morning comes when the wind has died and clouds have hidden the sun at last. The thing that will make the trout appear from nowhere is about to happen. The nymphs of a species of mayfly—Baetis tricaudatus—will rise through the water column and hatch on its surface, and the trout will rise with them.

  In midafternoon the mayflies are not there, no matter how hard I look, and then a minute later they are. It’s as though morels erupted from the grass while I watched, beneath every cottonwood and as far as the eye can see. The mayflies are the same color as the
river’s dull surface, their wings canted upstream over slender bodies. They drift into view no matter where I look, and coming into view among them are the heads of brown trout and rainbows, suddenly visible at last.

  I tried, with friends that night, to estimate how many Baetis hatched during the single hour of their emergence. Even the most conservative number looked improbable, and the probable number was unimaginable to us all.

  It’s taken me nearly thirty years—the thirty years since my mother died—to learn that what I miss the most about her is her voice. I can hear it, but I can’t tell you much about it beyond what most people know of a mother’s voice—that in childhood it fell like consoling shade on a hot ear. So much—the sound of her talking—I missed from the first. More and more, I lack the very way she talked, unadorned and ordinary as it was.

  My mother’s mother said “pie-anna” for “piano.” Like her daughter, she sat at that instrument in the intervals of housework and played hymns. Her voice had the reediness that comes to the throat after a hard life. I know a lot about my grandmother, but they’re things a child knows, not adult information. I don’t know a single sentence her parents ever said to her.

  My mom learned in school not to say “pie-anna,” and I would wager that she never once used a phrase that was uniquely hers. She spoke, as we all do, a temporal dialect—a speech made up in the main of plain, enduring words, but also of short-lived phrases that belong to a place and a moment. My dad, for instance, knows all the expressions that mark him as a man who has lived through the eighties and nineties. To “go for it” doesn’t mean to him what it would have meant to my mom. If I had told her to “go for it,” she would have asked what “it” was, where it was usually kept, and why I couldn’t get it myself.