More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 9
Now those paperbacks are coming apart. The pages have yellowed. The glue in the bindings has turned brittle. The edges are crumbling. I reread a Dorothy Sayers mystery a couple of weeks ago and found myself using one of the middle pages as a bookmark. Nearly all my old Penguin classics—the ones with the black spines—are dis-binding themselves. St. Augustine fell into my lap not long ago. Defoe was one of the first to go to pieces. You wouldn’t believe how sallow Samuel Butler looks, how debilitated Flaubert has become. Even poor Kierkegaard, published by Princeton, snapped in two the other day.
The books themselves aren’t really worth restoring. Their texts may be of permanent value, but the physical objects themselves are not. Rubber bands might hold them together, but rubber bands decay even faster than books. There are only two solutions. One is to go on handling the books ever more carefully until all that remains is neatly organized piles of yellow dust on the bookshelves. The other solution is to honor the ephemeral nature of paperbacks and replace them, as if they were vinyl LPs waiting to be replaced by CDs and then by “remastered” CDs.
But here’s the trouble. My Penguin copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is identical to the tens of thousands of other copies that were printed when that edition first appeared. Or it was when I bought it. But replacing it means abandoning all the marks I made in it when I read it in graduate school. The marks have almost everything to do with who I was as a reader in the late 1970s and almost nothing to do with Jane Austen. They’re probably worth abandoning for that reason alone.
But to me Mansfield Park is that one edition. Like many readers, I have a surprisingly visual memory for books. It’s easier for me to remember just where a passage appears, spatially, than exactly what it says. Replacing that old familiar edition means learning a new map of the text. That’s the peculiar thing about living with so many books. I can often picture just where I need to look inside a book, but I can’t remember where the book is actually shelved. The thought of remapping my literary memory is simply too much to stand.
In the late 1970s, I worked as a curatorial assistant at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and in the shelves behind my desk stood books that were hundreds of years old, the paper crisp and white, the ink still precise. Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra—the actual, original objects—weren’t quite as fresh as the day they were written, but even they were fresh enough to last another few centuries. The point of publishing was more than simply to emit a book—it was to give a text a kind of permanence.
For paperback prices I shouldn’t have expected a lifespan longer than my own, especially given that paperbacks really came into their own during my lifetime. But I didn’t expect such a synchronized collapse. This may not be the burning of the library at Alexandria, but it’s a slow, steady combustion.
And as for you who say, Aha!—this only proves the value of digitizing books, let me say that it’s not possible to digitize a book. You can digitize its contents, photograph its binding, record every last scrap of penciled annotation it contains. And yet the book can’t be digitized any more than the feeling that I know where that quotation is if only I could find the book itself.
March 22
Winter turning into spring is a long, slow earthquake. The roads heave with the frost, and so does everything else. I notice it especially along the fence lines. The posts begin to cant away from the vertical. The rails begin to slip their joints. A long straight fence line creates the impression that this piece of ground, this bounded field, is somehow a unit, a single thing. Winter comes along, then spring, and it becomes clear that each fence post is rooted in a place of its own, completely separate from its neighbors only a rail or two away. Once I got the picture of a long, slow earthquake in my mind, I found myself marveling at the futility of fences. Thirty miles down the road, someone has put up a white plastic post-and-rail horse fence, as clean and bright as the fencing in a child’s barnyard toy set. After one winter, half the rails have bucked free of the posts. I’ve begun to think of a fence as a line of buoys floating on the surface of a stiff sea.
A couple of weeks ago, the poultry yard went wild, and it’s remained so ever since. No foxes or skunks or weasels. No goshawks. Just the onset of the spring rut. Normally, a flock of ducks and geese is like a glob of mercury on a glass plate. It wants to cohere. There’s nothing easier than driving a flock of ducks and geese—a little patience, a hand gesture here and there, a sense of anticipation. But the coming of March has torn the flock apart. Some of the courtship is graceful, almost entrancing. I watched a Saxony duck and an Ancona drake bob their heads in time as they walked to the tank to drink, and as they drank they kept on bobbing. But courtship is hardly the word for the rest of what goes on. Suddenly there’s no flock. There are only small clusters of birds who resist being driven together. This will pass. But not soon enough.
To ease the hens’ lives, we’ve been killing the extra roosters. I caught a Welsummer the other morning and before it could protest I’d broken its neck. Here’s what I think about as that happens. I wish I had the skill of the farmwomen I saw when I was young, who knew the trick of giving a chicken an instant death with their hands. I need a certain rage in order to kill the rooster, a cold dose of rage, if that makes sense. I’m undone by the arbitrariness of it, the way one rooster wanders into my path and is suddenly gone in the unceremonious morning light. And I’m no less undone by trying to understand what happens in that death, what vanishes besides the Welsummer’s baleful stare. I feel where the vertebrae have separated. I think of my own neck.
April 26
The other morning, I looked out the south window to see if the flag had dropped on our rural mailbox. I saw a fox just beyond it, standing in the downfall of last year’s goldenrod. The fox paused long enough for me to get the binoculars, and then it moved to the base of a rock outcrop, part of the orbit she uses to approach our poultry. Three—perhaps four—young kits followed her. She turned and led them back to the lip of the den, where they crowded around her. She bent down and licked one of them. They were only a few pounds each—thick with soft, mottled fur. In another week the grass will be tall enough to hide them. A week earlier, and they would have been too young to leave the den. The vixen slipped up the hill again, and her young didn’t reappear.
The den is dug into the sunken foundation of a long-vanished out-building. I’m only a few steps away from those kits whenever I gather the mail. A few weeks ago I walked over to that old foundation to see if there was any fox sign, but it’s far easier to trace the vixen by her cries in the night—circling around our pasture—than it is by footprint during the day. I wasn’t even sure the den was really there. Now I know. I won’t go back again until midsummer, but I can’t stop watching.
The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar. When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life. That vixen may rely on us for a duck or a chicken now and then, and to keep the woodland from closing in. How she chose to den so close to us is beyond me. The answer is probably as simple as an available hole. Our only job is to leave her alone, to give her enough room to raise the next generation.
May 1
Reading Gilbert White’s entry for this date, which says, “men pole hops,” I’m struck as always by the economy of his journal. That is, I’m struck by the scale and complexity of the world, barely visible to us, that lies behind his brief notes. Behind that one phrase—“men pole hops”—you have to imagine the change this activity would have brought to Selborne. The parish was filled with small hop-gardens, many of them carefully protected from the wind by hedges. Each garden was planted in mounds laid out in a checkerboard pattern (sometimes a quincunx). By now, the farmers would have opened the mounds and examined the roots of the hops, choosing the strongest shoots—the ones that
aren’t “worn out of heart,” as one early writer puts it—and adding new mold and compost to them.
Then comes a day when everyone in the village turns to the labor of carrying hop-poles, made of ash or chestnut, into the gardens and erecting them. These poles were often twenty feet long and set firmly in the earth. As John Worlidge puts it in Systema Agriculturæ, “It is esteemed an excellent piece of Husbandry to set all the Poles inclining towards the South, that the Sun may the better compass them. This is most evident, that a leaning or bending Pole bears more Hops than an upright.”
So imagine the transformation. Suddenly in late April the parish sprouts a forest of bare poles. When the wind is high, they sound a note all their own. Before long, women will come into the hop-gardens and tie the vines to the poles. By mid-June, the vines will have “run out” the poles, turning each of these gardens into a patchwork of light and shade. By mid-August, the bloom has begun. Each year brings its own variation. Some years the hops—the flowers themselves—“promise well,” as White puts it. Some years, like 1773, a tempest blows up and makes “sad havock among the hops,” knocking down the poles and tearing the vines. Some years, like June 1783, it’s sultry and misty, “weather that men think injurious to hops.” By late September the hops have been picked (an extraordinary thing in itself), and “the whole air of the village of an evening is perfumed by effluvia from the hops drying in the kilns.” In early October, the bagged hops are carried to Weybridge Fair and put up for sale.
I add, merely as a note, that Worlidge recommends a tea made of water and pigeon dung for fertilizing the hop hills.
June 5
On the ground was a young woodchuck not half the size of a full-grown one. It lay on its back, feet spread evenly as if for dissection, fur still lustrous, bright curving teeth. There was also a profound hole at the base of its neck and a collar of blood. The grass seemed to suspend the woodchuck. Behind me in a birch tree stood a vulture that flushed when I came around the corner. It seemed to be trying to stand on one leg with wings raised, tipping side to side almost the way it does in flight. Sometimes it nearly lost its balance. A pair of crows complained from a higher branch. I had nothing to add.
What was interesting wasn’t the dead woodchuck. It would have eaten my beans later this summer. What was interesting was seeing the vulture come out of its column of flight and make a long, curving landing behind the barn. I knew there was something dead in the grass only because of the vulture’s hunching presence. It knew something was dead in the grass while it was high overhead. Death to me is still a curiosity, even after all this time here. To the vulture it’s simply a way of getting a living. The vulture lifted its wings again, as if to feel the breeze beneath them. I took a step closer and it flew away.
There was nothing mournful in any of this, and cruelty isn’t really a word worth using when talking about nature. The death of that woodchuck seemed surprisingly economical, considering what was happening on the rest of the place. The forest tent caterpillars—who knows how many of them?—have made their way up into the canopy of the trees, and they’ve erased May. Where there were young leaves there are now nearly empty branches. The roses are bare and so are the blueberries. So is the paper-bark maple. The walk down to the barn is littered with scissored leaf fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be assembled. A strange light makes its way down through the trees—not spring, not summer. I can’t quite capture the mood the light causes because I’ve never seen its kind before.
And yet some plants have gone untouched—the hydrangeas and a striped-bark maple. Perhaps there’s something unpalatable in their leaves, just as there seems to be something unpalatable in the caterpillars themselves. Nothing wants to eat them or to bother them in any way. Their destruction lies in their own numbers, I suppose. I heard the electric fence snapping clear across the pasture the other night—grounding itself on a fallen tree limb, I thought. But no. The caterpillars had crawled up a neutral brace wire at the fence corner, so many caterpillars that the current leaped from the hot wire into the gob of them, sparking.
June 28
Lately I’ve been thinking about the volume the birds around us occupy. I don’t mean the vast migratory territories they mark out over the course of a year. I mean the spatial dimensions of their ordinary lives among us. This is a thought that’s been working away in my head for a long time now, ever since I saw a red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail and realized that the bird and the wetland in which the cattail was rooted were essentially synonymous. Habitat, as a word, sounds awfully general. It turns out to mean not some willful choice—the kind a human makes deciding to live in Dallas rather than Denver—but a profound correlation. The marsh is who the red-winged blackbird is. The fence post is the meadowlark.
When I first began to notice birds, I thought of them as autonomous creatures whose habitations were simply unconnected matters of fact, as though the pictures of the birds in my bird book could somehow fly free of the book itself. But recognizing what you see means taking account of where you see it. It becomes clear that we live in a world of infinitely overlapping and abutting habitats. We’re one of the rare creatures that is unbound, except in the broadest sense, by place and vocation. It takes a conscious act of will on our parts to remember how profoundly and how beautifully bound to habitat the other creatures around us really are.
This thought occurs to me again and again on a fine summer evening, when the phoebes are fluttering after bugs, sometimes pausing on the grass, but swiftly coming to rest on the back of a lawn chair or the end of a twig. Where the phoebes won’t fly, the barn swallows take over, also pursuing insects. Sometimes a swallow will cruise past my head. Compared to the swallow’s manner, the phoebe flies a parenthetical flight. And as the two of them are taking bugs from very different regions of this place of ours—before they retire in favor of the bats—I can hear the catbird hidden in the densest shadow, mewing away. It shows itself just at the edge of the thicket, peering off into the clearing where a human sits hoping that the good weather lasts for a while this time.
August 2
I’ve tried growing tomatoes in page-wire cages and in stiff-wire cones. One year I let the plants flop along the ground, the way they seem to want to do. The past few years I’ve grown them on seven-foot stakes, a single stalk working its way upward. I’ve skipped most of the modern tomato technologies—red plastic mulch and water-filled girdles that keep young plants from freezing. I don’t even try to raise the seedlings myself. A friend raises them for me—heirlooms mostly. I put them in the ground around Memorial Day and wait.
I’m a ruthless pincher. Off go the suckers—sprouting in the joint between branch and stem—and off goes any branch that looks like it’s going into business for itself. Last week, several of the plants topped out their poles, and I pinched back the growing tips as if to say, “Vegetation is over. Time to ripen.” I wash my hands and the water is green. My other skill is tying up tomatoes. A couple of years ago I found the knot I needed—a loose, open overhand knot around the stem and then a square knot around the stake, the whole thing shaped like an 8. I use baling twine, of which I have an infinite supply, cut into forearm lengths.
As skills go in this complicated world, these are as simple as they come. And yet I can’t explain how much pleasure it gives me to examine each stem for suckers, to know that I’ve really looked those tomatoes over. As I tie up the stalks, I think about the storms that blow through this time of year—bruising rain, sudden downdrafts—and it’s good to know that the tomatoes are safely moored. I know there’s a harvest somewhere in my calculations. Other people’s vines have ripe tomatoes on them. But earliness isn’t everything.
The truth is that I’d rather grow tomatoes than anything else, with the possible exception of pumpkins. In a hard rain, pathogens may spring from the soil onto the lower leaves, corrupting them, but the tomato stalk pushes upwards, rampant, always probing outward, feeli
ng its way, almost disregarding the fruit it was meant to bear.
August 25
A couple of weeks ago, the hayloft was nearly empty—half a dozen bales in the northwest corner, a hay elevator, and a pair of young swallows in a nest above one of the light fixtures. The sliding double doors were open at both ends, adding to the emptiness. We feed a bale a night to the horses this time of year, and having only six bales on hand is a little worrying. But the grass has been especially strong this year. And besides, we knew the second cutting was already being baled. On Saturday we would stack 650 bales.
There’s nothing venerable about the barn. Internally, it’s a truss and plywood affair, built by the previous owners back when plywood was cheap. Every barn was new once upon a time, but the barns I knew in Iowa were already in their third and fourth generations of use. They’d been gnawed by time, sanded by the hides of so many milk cows coming in to stand at stanchion. Those barns feel more forceful, more solemn, the emptier they are—on the milking floor and in the hayloft—because their architecture is more visible. Our hayloft, on the other hand, seems raw when it’s empty, just a long slender plywood box.
But then the hay wagons come. I winch the elevator down onto a wagon-end. The farmers, who have lived their lives with hay elevators, make a few adjustments to the machine. They plug it in to see how it goes. The teeth chink their way up the incline. The bales, when they come, are like roller-coaster cars getting a lift up that first big hill. I catch them at the top and fling them back into the loft where two young men—eager for the workout—stack them. In a couple of hours there’s only enough room to slide the elevator back into the loft on edge. Later that afternoon, I remember to climb up to the loft and pull down the bales around the swallow’s nest so the barn cat won’t get the young ones.