More Scenes from the Rural Life Read online

  June 18

  The most famous line in Voltaire’s Candide is the final one—“We must cultivate our garden.” That is Candide’s response to the philosopher Pangloss, who tries again and again to prove that we live in the best of all possible worlds, no matter what disasters befall us. Maybe so, Candide says, but we must cultivate our garden. Ever since Candide was published in February 1759, that line has seemed to express a reluctance to get involved, an almost quietistic refusal to be distracted by the grand chaos of earthly events. That reading might make sense, if Candide hadn’t already lived through a lifetime of woe. In fact, that line is the summation of Candide’s wisdom: no matter how you choose to explain the world, the garden still needs cultivating.

  I thought of Candide the other morning at 6:15, on hands and knees in my own garden. I was transplanting tomatoes and peppers. It takes some practice getting on hands and knees at first. The hard part is psychological. Walking through the garden, I can maintain a certain aloofness, as if I were about to be called away by the telephone. But to kneel in the straw-bedded pathways, plucking lamb’s quarters from among the kale, is a powerful form of submission. The first time I surrendered to my garden work this season, I remember thinking that none of this seemed very important, the weeding, the watering, the planting. It’s such a tiny gesture to pull up a mallow or an oxalis before it gets away from you. Surely there were more important things to do—calls to make, writing to be done, news to follow.

  Candide’s most important lesson comes from a Turk who sends his fruit to be sold in Constantinople. “Work,” the Turk says, “keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” But even this is too much explanation. As the garden takes on substance, as the peas begin to shroud the sticks they cling to and the beans begin to climb their trellis, the garden grows in imagination, too. It wakes me up at first light, when the air is still cool. I go out with a basket of seeds and a small hand-hoe, and nothing seems more important.

  July 12

  Some previous owner of this place thought it would be a good idea to plant mint and Virginia Creeper around the garden. The nettles came on their own. All three plants lay down long, trailing roots—a telegraph line that runs from outpost to outpost. Pulling up those runners in loose soil is truly gratifying. Tug on a single nettle, and you can end up with an entire network of roots in your hand. You can hear them coming unzipped from the earth. Sometimes, working deep in the mint thicket, I follow a runner trail to what must have been an ancestral root cluster, a daunting mass of subterranean plant fibers. I feel as though I’ve suddenly stepped into a science fiction movie. I admire the native intelligence of this uncouth organism, its resourcefulness and its ability to replicate. But I know I must destroy it before it threatens civilization as we know it.

  Each year the garden promises that next year will be easier. The beds will already be laid out, waiting for seeds and transplants. The drip irrigation lines will be ready to lay once the ground thaws. But so far, each year in the garden has been harder work than the year before. And because this year has been the hardest by far—new raised beds and deep, wide hay-covered paths—I’m tempted to believe, once again, that next year will be easier. I don’t think I can work much harder anyway.

  But the work, like the garden, has its own architecture. Some days it’s just a relaxing visit to the tomato beds and the scent of late summer that comes from nipping new tomato shoots with your fingers. Other days it’s dawn to dusk, sometimes on the tractor, sometimes on my knees, but most often with a garden fork in my hands, reclaiming the open ground I lost last year. It seems hard to believe that this simple tool—four steel prongs and a wooden handle—could be such a taskmaster or that it could repay skill in handling. But so it is. I found the fork’s rhythm a couple of weeks ago, and now it won’t let me alone.

  July 14

  I cleaned my saddle on a hot afternoon in Wyoming recently. It’s a slick-fork western saddle, made for me nearly a decade ago by a saddle maker in Billings, Montana. At the time, I was spending part of every summer in the West, trying to learn as much about horses and horsemanship as I could. The days on horseback were always a strange tangle of joy and nervous anticipation. The horses were mostly strangers to me, and I was supposed to be imparting something to them, not merely taking what they had to offer. I rode, I learned a lot about horses, and the saddle darkened with use.

  I took off the cinches and stirrups. I removed the breast collar and laid it in the sun. I brushed away the dust and oiled the latigos and worked over the fine tooling on the skirts and fenders with a soft rag. I removed a plywood splinter wedged between the oak frame of the stirrup and its leather lining—the result of a collision in a Colorado round-pen. I even spent a couple of hours polishing the nickel-silver bindings on the stirrups, trying to restore the mirrored shine they had when they were new. But they’d been nicked and dinged too many times to ever gleam again.

  I’d spent part of that week in the saddle again. I was riding with old friends, including Buck Brannaman, and once again I was riding an unfamiliar horse, feeling in the way he moved how all the riders before me had responded to him. The horse’s name was Eddie. He’d spent part of his life trying to decide just what his numerous riders were trying to teach him. But since he rarely had the same rider twice, Eddie decided to stick with what he already knew. That’s why he felt the way he did under the saddle—a little stubborn, a little sluggish, but not unwilling. I spent three days getting him soft in the mouth again, easy to bend, light in my hands. In return, he reminded me how much I’d learned from horses. Eddie made me want to clean my saddle and come home and ride my own good horse, a quarter horse named Remedy, who has had plenty of time off.

  You’d think that a man with his own horse and saddle would ride every day. You’d be wrong. I took a job—this one—that has made it hard to haul the horses west for the summer. And somehow the East to me seems too full of excuses and inhibitions for western riding. Too much work to do. Too many trees and highways. Not enough sky-wide spaces or antelope. Even the pleasure of watching the horses grazing in their pasture became an excuse not to interrupt them. And in the end I lost track of the time. My saddle sat in the horse trailer. The stirrups tarnished in the damp eastern climate. Mold turned up on the cinches. And Remedy, who was nineteen when I bought him, slowly turned twenty-six.

  So I discovered when I got home from Wyoming last week. I put my newly clean saddle in the horse trailer and brought the horses down to the barnyard. Remedy usually leads the way, head high, a straight-up walk toward the feed pan and the hay rack. He’s always the first to catch a stray sound, the first to trot toward trouble. But this time he came last—stiff and visibly thinner than he’d been two weeks earlier. At his age a horse that loses mobility begins to lose flesh as well, and he’d begun to lose both while I was gone. The vet thinks it’s a matter of sore feet—a chronic condition with some aging horses—so I’ll do everything I can to ease his pain and build his muscles again. That means lots of riding on my part.

  Horses live a long time, long enough to make their owners believe they’ll always be there. What they ask from humans is an incremental relationship—consistency, steady work, small changes that build up over time into big changes. In the West, I’d watched my friend Buck help a horse get over being herd-bound. It took about twenty minutes of loping and trotting. And when it was over—horse and rider standing relaxed at the far end of the arena, away from the rest of the herd—Buck quietly remarked that that horse had just changed the way his life was arranged in twenty minutes. Not many humans could do that, he added.

  I don’t know whether horses have any consciousness of time. But I know that in his pain Remedy seems to be deep within himself. That’s not his way. In full health he is pure awareness, boldly alert. He can make you feel like an adjunct of his presence, as if he were vouching for you with the pasture gods. Now it’s my turn to vouch for him, to get him healthy and
ask him, before it’s too late, to tell me all the things he knows once more.

  August 6

  The other afternoon I walked out to the vegetable garden and saw a woodchuck inside the fence. It was standing on its hind legs with its back to me nibbling lamb’s quarters. This was like a burglar breaking into the house to shampoo the carpets. I watched for a minute or two, hoping the woodchuck would move on to some hairy galinsoga, another persistent weed. But then it turned and caught my eye. Instead of freezing like a cat about to pounce, it did a Tim Conway double take, dropped to all fours, and waddled out the back of the garden. I found the gap in the fence and fixed it.

  The woodchuck had bypassed all of the ripening vegetables in order to eat a weed that grows thick on this place and is as edible to humans as it is to woodchucks. Some people and some woodchucks take a special pleasure in eating what’s wild, but for me the pleasure is eating what I’ve cultivated myself. It’s a habit I learned from my parents, who grew up on farms where the kitchen garden was nearly as important as the crops in the fields.

  Those gardens were a matter of common sense, a way of providing for oneself. Like nearly every choice that humans make, they had an implicit political content. But the political content of our garden here, and our pigs and chickens, is overt—to step aside even a little from the vices of industrial agriculture. Our purpose is summed up in the words of an old victory garden poster, meant to encourage Americans to produce their own food during World War II. It says simply, “Grow Your Own. Be sure!”

  The victory garden movement came to an end when canned food no longer needed to be rationed. But in 1943, 60 percent of Americans grew victory gardens producing some eight million tons of food. Many people abandoned their vegetable plots when they were no longer a national necessity. Many others realized that fresh food and the pleasure of gardening more than justified the labor. Some were able to pass that realization along to their children. What my dad called “gardening,” I called “weeding.” I’ve learned few of the details of how he gardens, especially because he gardens in California. But I learned from him the feeling that something is missing without homegrown vegetables.

  Think of all the millions of houses across this country raising only grass and swing sets. Imagine turning up a corner of those lawns for lettuce and tomatoes. There’s plenty of use for the extra food in every community. Gardeners have always found ways to make their gardens tithe, if only because part of the pleasure is sharing the harvest. A national crisis turned America, for a few years, into a nation of gardeners. They planted victory gardens then because of a lack of canned food. We should plant victory gardens now because of a lack of victory gardens. How else will the habit get passed along?

  September 4

  The other night, just before dusk, I walked across the pasture with a bucket of grain. Two dozen chickens followed me in a mob. Some came running toward me, wings flapping, as though given enough room they might actually take off. I led them into their pen, scattered the grain, and closed the gate. Then I drove the ducks and geese into their yard. Drove is too strong a word. I hinted at the direction I wanted them to go and they went. I opened another gate and led the horses down to the barnyard. When they’d been fed, I stepped into the pigpen. The gilt came over for a rubdown, and the barrow flopped down beside her. They lay back to back, eyes closed, pale pink bellies available for scratching.

  Some evenings I notice the haze that settles in the valley or the big orange moon coming up over the trees. But that night I noticed how we all fit together, animals and humans. The piglets arrive pretty wild. Baby chicks clatter about the brooder house in fear. But time passes, and they all settle down. They seem to tame themselves somehow.

  That night I saw the ways that they’ve tamed me. I never rush the ducks. It only confuses them. I never ask too much when herding chickens. The horses expect a certain presence from me, which changes with every situation. The pigs want joy and vigorous scratching. None of the animals seems to want me to be other than human. But they do want me to be a human who knows how the world looks to them and respects it.

  All of our animals were raised among humans from birth. Except one—Nell, the mustang. We bought her nearby, but she was adopted as a weanling in Nevada—part of the federal wild-horse adoption program. I’ve seen other mustangs captured, so I have a good idea what it was like for her. She’s seventeen now and has lived the last decade with us. She’s been trained, trailered, ridden, and cared for. And yet it’s always a toss-up whether she’ll let me catch her.

  Our animals show their trust in us every day. But sometimes Nell trusts us, and sometimes she doesn’t. The freeze-brand on her neck isn’t the only sign of that long-ago capture. All the rest of us, animal and human, live together in a single place. Nell lives in her own. She reserves the right to withhold herself, to stand apart. The chickens grow placid, the pigs get to like us, and the other horses go on with their lives. And yet the most meaningful moments, after all these years, are when Nell crosses from her world to ours. She walks right up, as if to ask where I’ve been, and settles her head in my arms. I feel the choice she has made every time she makes it.

  September 24

  The merest touch of frost the other morning brought down the potatoes in the lower garden. It seemed all the more surprising because the vines had been so rank with growth. Suddenly all the green was gone and I could see the lumps where the new spuds—ready to be gathered—lay hidden under the straw. I began lifting potatoes. Wherever I pulled a plant I found earthworms thriving in the borderland between straw and soil, writhing in their sudden exposure. The potatoes looked overexposed too—still thin-skinned, their brilliant white flesh visible through their jackets.

  There’s really no getting used to the biological miracles on a small farm, the simple fecundity of the earth. A couple of months ago I scattered seed potatoes on raw, bare ground and buried them in old hay. The vegetation seemed like recompense enough, but now I have more potatoes than I know what to do with. I planted a dozen Steuben bean seeds in June. Now the pods have dried on the plants, and my dozen seeds have been repaid forty or fifty times over with new Steuben beans—white with a caramel eye—drying on the sideboard. Like most gardeners we’ve nearly fed ourselves sick on fresh tomatoes. Now they march directly into the kitchen, through a food mill, and into a pot of slowly condensing sauce, to be frozen for a winter day when fresh tomatoes are just a memory.

  There’s not a sign of stasis anywhere. The goldenrod, so vivid a couple of weeks ago, has faded to rust. That means the bees are tapering off as well. The past couple of years have been hard on honey bees—a combination of mites and bitter winters—but this hive is now in its second year. On a warm day the air thrives with bees outside the hive entrance. A strong smell of wax and honey and propolis drifts out of the frames. It adds just the right quality of darkness and sweetness to the complicated scent of this place.

  The floral traces have mostly vanished, replaced by the burlap scent of decay in the wild fields around us. But the strong scented notes are always the smells of manure and the animals that make it—the horses and the chickens and ducks and geese. What ties it all together is the smell of pig—not the toxic, scalding scent of an industrial operation but the much friendlier odor of two pigs who move often to new pasture. Our Tamworths are nearly full-grown. The barrow is as round as an overgrown cucumber. I forget how complex that farm scent is when I’ve been in the city for a couple of days. But when I get home, just after dark, it hits me all over again. I stand in the twilight, looking out over the pasture, wondering how those smells in the night air can seem so vital and so welcoming.

  November 24

  Darkness seems to collect at this time of year, as though it had trickled downhill into the sump of November. Fog settles onto damp leaves in the woods—not Prufrock’s yellow fog or the amber fog of the suburbs, but a gray-white hanging mist that feels like the down or underfur of some
pervasive beast. White birches line the slopes beyond the pasture as if they were fencing in the fog, keeping it from inundating the house in a weightless avalanche. The day stays warm, but even at noon it feels as though dusk has already set in. The chickens roost early. The horses linger by the gate, ready for supper.

  Usually I feel starved for light about now. But this year I’ve reveled in these damp, dark November days. It’s a kind of waking hibernation, I suppose, a desire to live enclosed for a while in a world defined by the vaporous edges of the farm. My ambition extends all the way to feeding the woodstove and sitting with Tavish the Border terrier in my lap, which perfectly suits his ambitions. The frenzy of the spring garden has long since faded. My plans to refence the place have been put on hold for another year. We’re just sitting around waiting for the ground to freeze.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, I know. I keep an endless mental list of things that need to be done. But when a gray day comes, when the horses stand over their hay as though there were all the time in the world to eat it, one of the things that needs doing is to sit still. The ducks and geese are especially good at that. They come out of their yard in a rush in the mornings and forage across the pastures and into the garden debris. But an hour or two later they lie on the lawn like ships on a green sea, some gazing at the world around them, some with their heads tucked into their wings. I consider myself a student of their stillness.

  November 25

  It occurred to me the other day, on an old familiar stretch of highway out West, to think of all the old familiar stretches of highway in my life. Not as a metaphor of some kind, or as a way, somehow, of seeing where I’ve gotten in life—the answer, in asphalt, being exactly nowhere—but just for the fun of it. If I had a more graphical imagination, I’d draw all those strips of road side by side in an oversized scrapbook or cut them out of the folding maps and glue them into a single discontinuous journey.