The Rural Life Page 8
What we’re missing here, in this kingdom of airborne bugs, is barn swallows. I don’t know where they are. The barn is ready and waiting. There are open pastures, and there are horses. There’s an overhead wire to perch on and gape at the world from. We don’t spray, and we don’t knock down swallow nests. So where are the birds? Phoebes take bugs on the wing, and so do the few tree swallows who live around here, and of course the bats. But it isn’t the same. Some quality about this place, some aspect of its rusticity, won’t be official until the barn swallows move in.
On the Fourth of July, the instinct is always to look backward in time, to the first news of that great Declaration, or to the days when Emerson could truly say that “the vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and carry its quality in their manners and opinions.” That habit of looking backward is a little like taking a rowboat under the pier once a year to see for ourselves that the pilings are still sound. It restores our confidence. It also reminds us how many transfigurations this nation has gone through over time and assures us that through all those changes there is a discernible continuity of political purpose, the same vested interest in independence. We still carry the scale of this land in our manners and opinions, if no longer the actual touch of its soil. We carry something, too, that our ancestors couldn’t: the scale of our own history.
One of the things you notice while looking backward on the Fourth of July is that everyone you come upon is looking forward. “It is the country of the Future,” Emerson said in 1844. Anyone else you might turn to, anyone else who has taken up a pen on the subject of America, says something similar. What Emerson meant, in part, was that his generation, as well as the young men he was speaking to, had devoted themselves to creating institutions whose benefit would be realized when they were long gone. “We plant trees,” Emerson wrote, “we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we chanced in our own persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.” Emerson’s future was not an abstraction. It lay in the institutional and social and physical landscape around him.
Looking back, you come again and again upon a jubilee of prose, a feast of optimism, an unparalleled faith that nature itself will redeem the American enterprise. That’s the Emersonian strain in our history. But alongside that strain you can always hear the question that Crèvecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer in 1782: “What is an American?” Men and women have given a lot of thought to that question, trying to puzzle out how the influences that shaped this nation would weigh out. The question hasn’t changed in all this time, though the influences have. A country born in a sense of limitlessness has found its natural, geographical limits. That day was always bound to come.
In a way, those early generations of Americans were unable to think of themselves as the future someone else had intended. Some were present at the revolutionary rupture with the past, and others, who were not, helped articulate its moral and political implications, which still felt as fresh to them as last night’s rain. But we must think of ourselves as the future someone else intended, because we are. Every eighteenth- or nineteenth-century attempt to suggest the potential of American liberty is a prediction of sorts. Some of them are sober and some wild beyond belief. But we’re living in the shade of those trees, in those stone houses, and under the aegis of those prospective laws. It’s still the country of the Future, but it’s also now the country of a rich, embracing Past.
The Fourth of July steals over a small town daydreaming the summer away. A young boy rides his bicycle in a serpentine pattern down the middle of a dusty street. Blue sky divides a broken pavement of clouds. The road out of town seems to stretch farther than usual before it fades out of sight between fields of corn or soybeans, alfalfa or cotton. Near a railroad siding, the silence of noon is broken by the sound of a mechanic’s hammer ringing against steel in the darkness of a repair shop. An old horse sleeps in a small corral behind the drive-in. The mail fails to arrive. A firecracker goes off in the alley.
It’s hard to believe that such towns still exist. Harder still to realize how many of them there are, once you leave behind the cities and the suburbs and the unincorporated sprawl and break out into the open. But in those towns the Fourth seems to come into its own, whether it’s a hamlet like Texas, Ohio, little more than a bait shop on the north bank of the Maumee River, or a place like Lander, Wyoming, where the Fourth goes off like the crack of doom.
The Fourth has no precise rituals. Some families serve potato salad at their picnics—those who have picnics—and some serve coleslaw. The bunting comes out of mothballs, and the high school band—in some disarray now that the seniors have graduated—prepares to march down Main Street playing Sousa. If the town is small enough, the parade will turn around and go back the way it came.
The self-reliance of small towns is easily mistaken for complacency, and the casualness of the Fourth in such places can be misread as indifference. The Declaration of Independence isn’t read aloud, nor is the Gettysburg Address. But when dusk comes and fireflies and crickets begin to go off under the trees, the park fills with people who have walked the few blocks from home for the fireworks. Grandeur isn’t on the program, nor is exaltation, just some modest municipal detonations, some rockets that rise shrieking over the fairground or river, worrying every dog in town. The sound of pale thunder breaks right overhead, and for once the lightning lasts long enough to see, raining earthward in a shower of sparks.
Since the first Fourth, Independence Day has been celebrated in just about every possible way, with emotions ranging from a throb of sanctity to irate mockery, with fireworks, parades, doubleheaders, hot dogs, speeches, demonstrations, and long afternoon naps on what feels delightfully like the second Saturday in the week. This is still the least commercial holiday in the American holiday roster. No one has figured out a way to sell the public on exchanging Independence Day presents, and you can only use so much red, white, and blue bunting before the front porch and the eaves start to look overdressed. The few things that always sell well for the Fourth—explosives—are illegal in most states. One good flag lasts a very long time.
In some celebrations of the Fourth—not many—there still exists an attractive vein of rationalism, a recognition that what’s being celebrated is both an event and an idea. Rationalism doesn’t sound like a very patriotic emotion, or much like an emotion at all, but it’s the spirit in which the Declaration of Independence was written, and it reflects a historic part of the American character, a brusque, native skepticism that’s rarely honored enough these days. In the phrasing of the document, in the way it was promulgated, there was an assurance that reason was preferable to sentiment and that the reason embodied in the Declaration of Independence would be sufficient to dissolve whatever feeling still bound Americans in that era to England.
You hear it said repeatedly that the Fourth is America’s birthday, which is true, but not true enough. The emotion the holiday most often summons is patriotism, love of country, which is good, but not good enough. A rodeo queen in sequins races into the arena in a western town, circling the crowd on a fast horse, standing in her stirrups, the American flag she holds snapping in the wind while the announcer lets his voice overflow with feeling. Everyone in the grandstand rises and their hearts rise too, mostly. This is a fine thing, but it’s not what has carried us all these years, not this alone, no matter what form it takes.
By now it’s almost impossible to read the words of the Declaration of Independence—especially its unequivocal statement of self-evident truths—without emotion, without acknowledging, at least, that its rhythms ring with a familiarity next door to emotion. But the Declaration doesn’t adjure its signers or the people they represented to strong feeling or, for that matter, to patriotism. It adjures them to a sober consideration of causes and first principles based on the laws of nature. It speaks
not only to the idealism of its first audience but also to its pragmatism, its sense of justice. These are the qualities that have preserved the fundamental idea with which this country began. We speak as though conviction were always an emotion and as though emotion were the deepest experience a human could know. The authors of our freedom knew better.
A mosquito lies on its back, dead, on a sheet of white paper on a desk. Its banded legs are thinner than script from the nib of any pen, and they point straight toward the ceiling. Under a magnifying lens the mosquito—a female—resolves into a hairy thoracic ball, delicately fringed wings, a segmented, countershaded abdomen (dark above, light below), a pair of antennae, some mouthparts called palps, and eyes that seem to focus, cross-eyed, on the tip of its needlelike proboscis. She looks like what she is: a drilling rig with wings. She died from effrontery. She floated down through the lamplight and into full sight on the inner arm of the human who killed her. He was able to watch the mosquito deliberate as she stalked slowly into position. When her legs stiffened and he imagined he could hear the hydraulic whine of the drill about to bore into flesh, he struck. Without anger, without vengeance, but not without pleasure.
Insects tap and flutter against the window, borne in through the darkness on a tide of light—mayflies and caddis, moths and beetles, pulled off course by the glow from a reading lamp. Out in the night itself, fireflies have nearly reached their summer’s peak. Where the lawn ends and the field begins, a wall of vegetation has grown up, thicker and for its height more impenetrable than any rain forest on earth. Above the grass heads and seedpods and leaves and fronds, the fireflies stutter like slow sparks. They constellate and then, for a moment, they all go dark at once.
Mosquitoes never blink to each other, nor do they flock to a lit pane on the side of a house. They are not so easily diverted. Before converging on a victim, they seem to pause, to create the illusion that this one summer evening will be biteless. It must be quite a sight to see a human through skeeter eyes. There he stands, hatless, barefoot, in T-shirt and shorts, an incandescent pillar, a beacon of warm blood at the edge of the field. On his face there’s a slow-footed look. He thought he would just walk down to the field to watch the fireflies for a minute. He thought the night would be empty except for the bugs he could actually see in the dark. But the night is not empty. He swats at the shrill pitch in his ear and gets bit behind the knee. He bends to rub it and gets bit on the ankle. He scrapes his shoulder against his neck and slaps at his arms. He thinks he can stay ahead of the bites, but he is always behind. Each prick on his skin is already farewell. He pretends to saunter up the lawn to the house, as if nonchalance mattered to the mosquitoes drifting in upon him. He stoops once more, stops sauntering, and starts to run.
A couple of years ago, judging by roadside signs, it looked as though the rural economy of America depended almost entirely on the sale and resale of Beanie Babies. On every country road you passed hand-lettered squares of cardboard, nailed to a fence or tied to a mailbox, announcing the availability of Beanie Babies. If you didn’t know what Beanie Babies were, the signs could be confusing—LAMBS FOR SALE at one farmstead, PIGLETS at another down the road, and BEANIE BABIES at a third. As I drove home from the train station the other night over an hour of country roads, I realized I hadn’t seen a BEANIE BABIES sign in a long time. That sector of the rural economy has moved to the Internet.
But the roadside is still a public market. Never mind the farm stands, which are now coming into their midsummer glory. What I mean is the person who builds utility trailers, one by one, in the garage in his spare time and then parks them beside the road with a FOR SALE sign on the hitch. Or the kids who run a summer business selling small bags of CAMP WOOD by the side of the road for about $1,000 a cord. Nearly every farm has a lot, usually behind a machine shed, full of old implements half-buried in tall grass. Some of them are genuine antiques, some are too good to be given up, and some are junk. But every now and then there is one that is just the right vintage—a 1980s feed wagon, say—to be stationed out near the ditch. You don’t even have to see the FOR SALE sign to know the wagon is for sale. Something about its position says it all. The wagon isn’t really talking to the weekenders heading upcountry. It’s talking to the farmers who drive by it every day, for whom the blacktop highway is still a local farm road.
There’s a gesture in those roadside offers—the short red school bus, the $1,100 pickup—that I can’t help admiring. At first they look like pure dismissal, a way of unloading disused pieces of equipment or making a little extra money on stuff that was just lying around anyway. But they’re really invitations. They show a confidence in the passerby and in time. Someone will park on the shoulder and take a slow walk around that feed wagon, perhaps even crawl underneath it to check the running gear. Maybe not soon. But when it happens, the doorbell will ring or the dogs will bark. A stranger will present himself, someone from farther up the road, across the ridge, down the valley. The price was firm once, back when the wagon was new, a price anyone could understand. But now the wagon belongs to a different economy, which is as much a matter of tact and understanding as it is dollars and cents. It’s a matter of knowing what things that have lost or long outlived their prices are really worth, stranger to stranger, neighbor to neighbor.
The sign of full summer is a child’s bicycle—the kind with a pink frame, white tires, and a white wicker basket on the handlebars—strapped to the rear end of a minivan. The van, with out-of-state plates, is parked at a pullout at Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah. With his free hand a father is trying to wave his family closer to a wooden sign that marks the altitude. On the sign a raven sits, wise to the ways of tourists. The man’s other hand holds a video camera.
For a few seconds the family smiles together into the lens. Behind them, beyond the hoodoos and the bristlecone pines, lies an unintelligible vastness. The family packs back into the car and drives on, to the next pullout, the next vista, the next motel or campground. The raven blinks.
This is the traveling time of year, vacation time. The campgrounds are full at all the national parks. At the major interchanges on the major transcontinental routes, the motels fill up by midafternoon. A brisk trade is being done all across the nation in plastic tomahawks and beaded coin purses, in cheeseburgers and Sno-Kones, in postcards and shrink-wrapped firewood. At the truck stops there’s a sudden perplexing infusion of white-legged people who pull up to the wrong pumps and wander uninvited into the truckers’ lounge. At every mountain pass a subdivision of white recreational vehicles inches its way uphill, vehicles with names like Conquest, Chieftain, and Eagle, but with satellite dishes and microwaves too.
All in all, this looks less like the quest for difference than the diffusion of sameness. Travel gets easier all the time, and it gets harder every year to distance yourself from the web of familiarity that’s been thrown over the approaches to scenic America—the web of ATMs, chain restaurants, chain motels, and chain experiences. Beneath the convenience of it all lurks a hidden fear of disappointment and strangeness, of feeling displaced, of coming to the limits of a known world.
The scenery itself has been changed by so much familiarity. A vista is no longer the point of departure for an experience, the view from the trailhead, so to speak. It has become the experience. Long ago, America set out to democratize the sublime, to provide motorized access to the great natural vistas across the country. The effect has been to downsize the sublime, if only because there’s no longer a sense of approach, of discovery. The trail is too well marked with souvenir shops and soft ice cream.
In a stand of trees—an acre of downed timber and blackened trunks—a three-year-old elk grazed, the velvet on his antlers still plush and unrubbed. His paunch sagged with the weight of constant feeding, and on his back sat a cowbird, heedless. The sun was still a half-hour above a knoll to the west, and in the evening light the seedheads of the grasses across the river, where the elk stood, looked ponderous, dense and purple. T
he river was the Gibbon, where it bends far away from the highway in a section of Yellowstone called Elk Park.
I had come to fish, and I sat with two good friends, in waders, feet dangling in the river. The fishing, highly speculative, would wait until the sun fell below the treeline and a mayfly called the brown drake appeared, if it appeared at all. Where we sat, the Gibbon flowed from west to east. Its surface, full of conflicting currents, was as bright as the fading sun. Weed beds covered the bottom, and water lilies edged the far bank. Every now and then a lily pad would turn on its side and knife downward through the water in a motion like the arc a trout makes when it rises and falls through the surface, feeding. One of us would hold a hand up to the sun and watch caddis flies drifting, like the cotton from cottonwoods, across the back-lit meadow, across the dark timber to the west. The elk lay down in the tall grass at the river’s edge, ruminating.
After a few visits to Yellowstone you get used to the happenstance of seeing wildlife. One year the thermal meadows near the Firehole are full of bison. The next year at the same time, the flies have already driven them to higher ground. The highway through Yellowstone, to which most visitors cling, comes to seem like a lottery of sorts, a path through a set of loose probabilities—weather, season, time of day, and so on—that determine whether you’ll come across a moose or a coyote or any of the other creatures whose habitations seem, to humans, entirely unfixed. To the movements of animals in Yellowstone, we naturally impute a narrow determinism—they’re driven by hunger, irritation, danger, courtship. But to what do the elk in Elk Park impute our love of asphalt?
For a while, when darkness began to settle, it looked as though the brown drakes wouldn’t appear. A few caddis began laying eggs on the water, slowly working their way upstream. Brown drakes are very big mayflies. They don’t stroll out of the woods, like elk, or pick their way silently across a meadow, the way mouse-hunting coyotes do. They adhere to the corridor of the river as tightly as tourists adhere to pavement. They simply appear when the light is low and the air and water temperature are right.