The Rural Life Read online

  The hives used to stand in the shelter of a stone retaining wall beneath an old elderberry tree. As always, the elderberry budded out in late March, buds as big as bumblebees. Then it stopped, seeming to wait for something that would allow it to flower and bear fruit and draw cedar waxwings into its branches once again. But that something never came. Three weeks ago I backed the tractor up to the tree, looped a chain around its trunk, and pulled ahead. The elderberry popped out of the ground with almost no resistance. But where that dead trunk rose from the earth there’s now a stiff green brush of new elderberry stems, two feet tall. They sprang out of nothing, in no time, as if the old trunk had been damming them up. Last weekend I walked down to that corner of the garden and tried to comprehend that those bright stems are the same plant as that gnarled old tree. I can’t quite grasp it.

  For some reason the sight of that elderberry carried me back a year, to a hospice room in Sacramento where my stepmother, Sally, whom I’d known for more than half my life, lay in a coma, dying. All life support had ceased, and those of us who gathered around knew that the self within her had withdrawn for good. But the vigorous breathing continued, one day, then another and another. I can still feel the force of those breaths, the elemental power of the reflex that drove them. The conscious life we live seems so fragile that it comes as a shock to witness the organic thrust toward living that underlies it. I never understood the optimism or the power of that reflex until I watched, hour after hour, the raw persistence of those unthinking breaths, which finally ceased while my brother John and I stood over her one night. Our breathing seemed shallow by comparison.

  Sometimes it seems as though I grew up in the backseat of the family car, face plastered to the window. Summer after summer we drove from Iowa to the Black Hills, to Wyoming, to Colorado, never eastward. We also lived a hundred miles, in opposite directions, from both sets of my grandparents, whom we visited again and again. The car hummed along the high asphalt crown between the ditches. We drove through thickets of grove shade and farm scent. Barnyards gaped suddenly as we passed and then they closed again as quickly.

  The way to look at it all was to accept its passing. To see something interesting you had to be looking right at it as it flew by. If you didn’t see it, you wouldn’t see it, no matter how quickly you turned your head or how hard you looked back down the road. There was no entanglement with the scenery. Sometimes a farmer would wave from the field or a woman from beside a rural mailbox. Sometimes a driver coming the other way would raise a couple of fingers. That was it. In the far distance the horizon slowly revolved while houses and outbuildings, cattle and soybeans, seemed to fling themselves past us along the roadside, slowing only as we came to the outskirts of a town. A lot of us grew up that way.

  But in this present life, I sometimes ride an old quarter horse named Remedy up the gravel road that runs past our place. The pace of travel is different, of course, and the scenery is no longer self-contained. A drama taking place in a driveway or a side yard doesn’t elapse in a split second, as it does when you drive by in a car. It has a chance to play out, and our passing changes the way it plays. As we ride along the road, Remedy and I are always trading measures of alertness. He notices everything long before I do, but he’s surprised by things I happen to know are not surprising. We’re implicated in the world. Everyone waves, and we wave too. People come out onto their porches and pull curtains aside to look, and we look back. There’s more than enough time for acknowledgment.

  East of our place runs a two-lane blacktop road just like the ones that crisscross Iowa. Most of the time it’s pretty quiet, but for a few hours on weekends it carries a lot of traffic. Squads of bikers come rumbling down the hill, while RVs struggle up the hill. On Saturdays a parade of pickup trucks towing race cars makes its way to the track ten miles northwest of us. In winter and on rainy days, truckers rattle their jake brakes all the way down the hill.

  Whenever I work in the vegetable garden or attend to the bees or feed the horses, I step into an amphitheater that rises from the road. I imagine myself as a child driving past in the backseat of the family car, looking across a pasture at a man walking down the yard in a bee suit and a veil. I’m visible for only a second and then I’m gone.

  A visit to Walden Pond doesn’t resolve the image of Henry Thoreau. What it does instead is clarify the contradictions, the disparities from which that image is shaped. The light rising from the surface of the pond on a June afternoon reflects indiscriminately on the objects around it. The same was true of Thoreau’s mind, no matter how ill assorted the objects he wrote about might have been. What harmony there is in Thoreau’s thinking, I believe, came from the collision of dissimilar ideas, the struggle, as he might have put it, between the acorn and the chestnut obeying their own laws.

  Thoreau’s best work is the result of two very different but complementary perspectives. One came about when he refused to pay his poll tax and was jailed in Concord for a night. Of the village and its institutions on that evening, he wrote that he was “fairly inside of it.” The other perspective was, of course, the one he took when he chose to live fairly outside of Concord, in a small, handbuilt cabin on a rise above Walden Pond.

  Both stances, for that’s what they were, were honored a couple of summers ago in a clearing on Pine Hill, just southeast of the pond, by a crowd that included the president and the first lady. The occasion was the dedication of the Thoreau Institute and the permanent conservation of ninety-six acres of the Walden Woods, both brought about by Don Henley, lead vocalist of the Eagles.

  President and Mrs. Clinton had come to Walden at Henley’s invitation. So too had the professors who introduced Henley to Thoreau’s writings, and so had Mohandas Gandhi’s great-granddaughter and Ed Begley Jr. and the rest of the Eagles. And so, most improbably of all, had Tony Bennett, who jogged out of the Walden Woods and onto the stage as if it were the Copacabana. He sang one unaccompanied verse of “America” and then trotted back into the arms of the waiting foliage. It was an afternoon of disparities, which the bright sun did nothing to dispel.

  When the president stepped up to the lectern and leaned his arms across the top, I couldn’t help thinking of what Thoreau noticed during his night in jail—not the striking of the town clock or “the evening sounds of the village,” but the fact that he’d never “seen its institutions before.” I’d never seen the institution of the presidency in person before, but the man on the stage stood deep within it, and he talked about the distortion it created, remembering a time when he and his wife could walk in the woods without the experience seeming more real to observers than it did to the two of them.

  It was a basic trope of Thoreau’s mind to search for a point of view slightly higher than the one you could gain from the top of Pine Hill. He couldn’t say what you might see from the very highest vantage point, but perhaps his own was high enough. “It is not many moments,” he wrote, “that I live under a government, even in this world.” I tried to imagine what Thoreau might have said about the tribute being paid to him from so deep within a primary institution of a government he barely acknowledged, but there were too many answers, all of them true and all contradictory.

  When the early bird sings at four A.M., the only other sound is the dogs running out their dreams at the foot of the bed. Somewhere on the Atlantic the sun is already rising, but at our place the sky at that hour is no brighter than tarnished silver, a superior dullness in the eastern windows. The early bird is extremely early, and it seems to have perched on the bedside lamp, so piercing is its call. In the phonetic language birders use to represent birdsong, the early bird says, “Why don’t—you get—up?—Why don’t—you get—up?” But at four A.M. it’s all too easy to drift back to sleep. Soon the early bird seems to be saying, in dreamlike fashion, “Guess what—you’ve just—won! Guess what—you’ve just—won!” It’s worth putting on some clothes and going to find out.

  It’s forty-four degrees outside. The grass is wet with dew. Breath
hangs in the air almost as quietly as Venus in the southern sky. The early bird, a nesting robin by the sound of it, is stationed in the boughs of a pine across the road. The clarity of the robin’s call is a measure of the silence. It will be a windy day, the trees full of their own noises by afternoon, but for now their stillness enlarges the scale on which this solo bird performs. When the robin pauses for a moment, I can hear everything in the world, because there’s almost nothing to hear.

  Winter mornings hinge on just a change in light without much change in sound. But a summer morning when the sky first glows is a cathedral of anticipation. The choirs that Shakespeare had in mind are neither bare nor ruined, only silent, until one by one, and then all in a rush, the birds fill in. It was never quite so clear before this morning’s walk that song is an attribute of light. The birds understand it perfectly. A finch begins to call in a lazy, staccato pulse, the rhythm of an inexpert seamstress on an old-fashioned Singer. A cardinal starts to spear the air with his voice. Down at the foot of the grape arbor, a cowbird suddenly fizzes and pops. The canopy of trees is answered by the understory, and the tall grasses in the eastern field fill with birdsong too. One by one the birds add depth to the horizon, until at last there’s room for the sun to rise.

  It’s been an abrupt, sodden spring in southwestern Montana. The rivers are full of snowmelt and will be full for many days to come. At Carter’s Bridge, just south of Livingston, the Yellowstone River sucks at the concrete pilings with a low, hydraulic hiss. The discolored current swarms with floating debris, mostly cottonwood branches, their bark half stripped by the commotion. Upstream and down, the river gnaws at its banks, pulling away great fragments of earth, which struggle for a moment and then succumb, dissolving in a darker swirl of water.

  In Yellowstone National Park, not far from the western entrance, there’s an enormous meadow where, in normal times, the Madison River bends away from the road toward a cliff face in the distance. Last week that meadow was totally submerged. I stood near the road and watched bison wading belly-deep across a limitless sheet of water, as if they were amphibious. They moved somnolently, all except one young male who was running to catch up with the herd, splashing his way in the bright sunlight. He looked like an American version of the bull who carried Europa out to sea. Some bison had managed to climb up onto the roadway. They swung their heads as they walked, their fur hanging in tatters, like seaweed, from their flanks.

  Still farther into the park, along the Firehole River, the buffalo wallows had turned into tide pools. In some there was only a dense swirl of algae, but others quivered with temporary life, the nymphs of aquatic insects trying to conceal themselves from a burning sun. Here the bison were dry, their sleek, red calves grazing beside them. When they’re this young, buffalo calves look like they belong to a different species than their parents, who seem to be all head and spine. The difference in appearance causes much confusion. One visitor, watching an early June herd of adults and young, asked a local angler which were the buffalo and which were the bison. A truly perplexed tourist praised the Park Service for assigning St. Bernard dogs to guard the herds.

  Slowly the bison on the Firehole River drifted out of the hot sun and into the timber. They left behind a carcass of their own kind, now many days old and still pungent. A solitary raven did a questioning dance across the river, its ratcheting call echoing over the water. In the far distance, an angler walked down to the murky flow of the Firehole. With his rod beneath one arm, he lifted his hands together, apparently to pray. He stood that way for a very long time. He was selecting a trout fly, as if, under such unpromising conditions, his choice might actually make a difference.

  The dogs hear it in the distance before I do, and so do the horses, a dry dislocated thump, thunder from far away. One moment there’s no wind, the air still and damp. The next moment the wind is turning corners where there aren’t any, lifting and coiling the barnyard dust. Wind flails the leaves on the sugar maples, revealing their silver undersides. It scatters spent hickory flowers in drifts. The sky blackens, and I can almost hear rain begin. But then the wind drops and the front unravels over the western ridge, where the weather comes from. Blue sky intervenes. A clear night threatens once again, Venus hanging peaceful in the dusk.

  It’s gone on this way for several days here in the midst of a dry season. Rain promises, and then the cloud cover, which was as tight and dense as a peony bud, blows away in loose tatters to the east. There’s no point waiting for thunder to crowd in overhead and rain to fall. But a single thump sets everyone listening, ready to count the seconds between the flash and the crack of the storm, ready to welcome the hard downpour if it ever comes, though it will cut the garden soil and beat the last of the peonies to the grass.

  And yet somehow the need for rain domesticates the very idea of a thunderstorm. Were a storm to blow in now, soaking the earth, it wouldn’t be Wagner that ushered the thunder across the treetops and into the clearings, tearing at tree limbs and driving the horses into a frenzy. It would be Rameau, and in the beat of the thunder coming overland there would be something folkish and formal at once, a country dance welling up through the refined strains of an operatic suite.

  The horses would circle the pasture in a ground-eating trot, and the trees would sway in some sort of unison, a hiss arising from the new rain on their leaves. I’d hear the clatter of the downpour on the barn’s metal roof all the way from the covered porch. The Shakespearean undergrowth on this small farm—the dame’s rocket and cow vetch and ground ivy—would twitch under the heavy drops, and the old question of how bees fly in rain would present itself once again.

  Only then would something come unhinged in the music of the storm, the lightning moving too close, the shade deepening too abruptly, one of the dogs fetching his breath up short with anxiety. The cataclysm would gradually slide across the valley, and as it did Rameau’s music would be heard again, dying away in the east, the ground sated with rain. If only the storm would begin.

  Iowa farmers used to call a stalk of corn growing in a soybean field a “volunteer.” I’ve always loved the personification lurking in that use of the word, as though a cornstalk among the soybeans were like a zealous schoolgirl sitting in the first row of desks, arm thrust in the air after every question. Farmers get rid of volunteers with chemicals now, but in the early 1960s they organized gangs of kids to walk through the bean fields pulling up volunteers as well as the real weeds. This was called walking, or cleaning, beans. The goal, of course, was higher yields, but there was also a German vanity lurking in the desire for a perfectly clean field and perhaps also a perfectly disciplined child.

  This place is choked with volunteers, nearly all of them welcome. In fact, if the plant community on this place consisted only of individuals I had put in the ground myself, or that had spread from seed of my sowing, it would resemble one of those fading Midwestern farm towns where the schools have closed, the grocery stores have pulled out, and the only new building in town is the nursing home. Instead this place is crowded with life. Outside my second-story office window, the leaves of a birch tree living in a planter tap against the screen. I had nothing to do with it. Potato vines claw their way out of the compost heap, no matter how often I turn it. On the north edge of the vegetable garden, a young hickory has started up out of nowhere, but in exactly the right spot.

  Last summer I planted a striped-bark maple called Acer tegmentosum, which came all the way from California. A few days ago I took a walk up the dry creek bed behind the barn, a ravine that thunders with runoff after heavy rains, looking for the spot where its water goes underground. I noticed a familiar leaf and realized that I was surrounded by a grove of striped-bark maples—a species called Acer pensylvanicum, but otherwise almost identical to the one in the garden.

  Walking back to the barn, I crossed a slope filled with maidenhair ferns, not a bit different from the cultivated one we put beside the hostas last spring. The hillside, once a field, had filled with saplings. A c
ouple of years ago, you might have mowed them down with a bush hog. No longer. They’ve passed the point where they could accurately be called volunteers. Now they’ve made the place their own.

  In 1969 my father and I drove from Sacramento, California, to George, Iowa, to gather a few of my grandmother’s belongings. She had lived at the edge of George in a house of dark woodwork, scented by geraniums standing in the winter windows and by a slightly scorched odor from an old electric stove. When my grandfather died, much of the substance seemed to go out of that house, and my grandmother followed him into the earth soon after. Now all that was left were empty cupboards and closets and drawers. We took home to California a stiff wooden chair and an old rolltop desk that had stood in a small room on the second floor, its drawers stuffed with valueless yen brought back by one of my uncles from the postwar occupation of Japan.

  For most of their adult lives, my grandparents lived and worked on a farm northwest of George. My father grew up there, and it was unclear what he felt when we came to visit it, as we often did when we still lived in Iowa. I still feel a kinship to that farm—to the house and grove and a long-since reordered pattern of fields—without ever pretending that my feelings could serve as a sort of levy on the place. I suspect my father felt the same way. There wasn’t enough land in the family for every one of his father’s children to inherit a farm of their own. Besides, this was America, the Midwest, where the idea of a legacy in land only a couple of generations under the plow seemed almost czarist. Instead of farming, my father became a public-school music teacher, a career that appeared to lead away from the soil. In 1966, when he was thirty-nine, he moved west from Iowa with his young family and started again, as many Iowans did, in California.