The Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  A few years later Dad bought thirteen acres in the oak and madrone hills east of Sacramento, within sight of the Sierra Nevada, and my brothers and sisters and I came home for part of the summer of 1978 to help build a house there. The foundation slab—a rectangular pool of concrete that looked like slick water on an overcast day—had already been poured when I arrived from New York. It was notched into an eastern slope overlooking a ryegrass pasture studded with ponderosa pines. And that’s where an old conversation with my father resumed—how expansive that slab seemed, how perfectly level, how smoothly finished, and what it promised about the house we would build upon it with our own hands. Plumb and level and square—while we worked our talk realigned itself around those perfectly unambiguous standards. As subjects go, plumb and level and square sound too rectilinear, but not in the mouths of a father and son looking for something to say. “Close enough”—both of us eyeing a spirit level laid against a beam or along a header—became words of genuine, unexpected complicity.

  There had been years of do-it-yourself construction in our household, years of work with drill and hammer, shovel and saw, day after day when I might have spoken this particular language with my dad. When I was a young boy he taught me how to nail together beehive frames and brood boxes in the basement of our house, which he and his brother-in-law built. There was always a project of some kind under way—turning a garage into a bedroom, pouring a new patch of concrete, reroofing the house. But by the time we moved to Sacramento and I entered high school, I was already living on some dark planet orbiting between my ears, inaccessible to the humble claims of amateur carpentry. And no wonder. When Dad got up from the dinner table, disgusted beyond words with another of my ironic impieties, he usually retreated to the woodshop he had built near an apricot tree in the far backyard. Silence and glum looks fell all around the table whenever that happened—until from the shop, rising high above the sounds of traffic on Watt Avenue, came the repeated, inarticulate scream of a table saw. I used to joke that Dad was crosscutting two-by-fours and pretending that each piece of pine was my stiff, impenitent neck. Only my mother found it hard to laugh.

  One after another these images gather—crossing the high plains of Wyoming more than thirty years ago during the long drive “back,” as we always said, to Iowa, both of us watching the moonlight on the snow between Rawlins and Laramie—the two of us wandering, not quite together, through my grandmother’s empty house in George that bitter cold Easter—the sullen distance between us as I drifted into private insurrection in high school and college—and then a picture of him standing between the studs of a wall we had just raised on that new foundation, while behind him, well off to the east, rose the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada, all their difficulty smoothed by distance.

  Now, so many years later, I find myself in a new relation to the old story. I’m as old as my father was when the shape my young life was taking must have looked most hopeless to him, when he might have given up guessing altogether the shape my life would take. Lindy and I have no children, and when the state of our childlessness occurs to me, as it often does, I also think of something my brother John said when his son, Jake, was born—that he suddenly understood Dad in an entirely new way. Instead of a child to understand my father by, I have an old house and this land—a pasture, stone walls, outcroppings of bedrock, and ordinary, acidic soil set in a largely graceless climate. Every time I walk out onto this property with a tool or a pair of gloves or a purpose, I think of my dad walking out, in exactly the same manner, onto his property in the foothills of California. I realize that I’ve been caught up in an urge—an atavism really—that reaches well past the limits of my own nature. I’ve discovered a stirring, restless desire to improve this place—to father myself upon it.

  My plan in buying this small farm wasn’t to tutor the pasture and the sugar maples and the hemlocks. I hoped instead to let the landscape tutor me, to lie fallow for a while myself. But most days I find myself walking out the mudroom door in old jeans and a torn jacket and leather gloves. There are asparagus crowns to be trenched or apple trees or roses to be planted or a garden plot to be tilled. An entire pasture needs refencing. The chain saw needs sharpening, and when that’s done there’s a pile of logs to be cut into stove lengths. One of the yard hydrants leaks, and the barn needs to be emptied, cleaned, redivided, rewired, hay stacked, manure hauled.

  Some days I do just the one thing that needs doing most, whatever it happens to be that day. But many mornings I leave the house and find myself, hours later, in a trance of physical labor, covered in sawdust or mud or sweat, muttering quietly to myself. This is the very work I hated as a kid, the thing I dreaded whenever my dad came into a room where I sat reading. “I need some help,” he would say and then walk out the door ahead of me, a little slumped in the shoulder, perhaps from knowing how grudging my help would be. It’s not grudging now. I used to believe you could choose your influences. That’s the principle behind every rebellion. Now I know that they choose you.

  A few years ago I learned that my dad had consulted seriously with his father before moving to California in 1966. It was a small detail, but it reminded me that his life was not just an adjunct of my own. When I was young, he had always been in the public eye, even if it was only a small-town public. He was a bandleader—the man who stood at the conductor’s podium in the high school gym, who directed summer concerts in the town park band shell, whose white, gold-braided band uniform hung stiffly in the closet. I had watched him playing cards with his wry farming brothers, their wit more caustic than his own, with a gift for irony that he has never had. I had seen his perennial optimism—his self-assurance. I noticed how readily people turned to him for practical advice and how sound that advice usually was. He tended to exaggerate, and he had a hard time admitting the limits of what he knew, but whenever I noticed those things he was in the presence of his smart-ass kid. From time to time, when I was still a boy, he took me outside town to visit farmers he knew—men whose children he had taught to play clarinet or drums. Those farms awoke a different man in him, the same one I saw working in the woodshop or garden. I was so bent on avoiding that work when I was young that I never wondered how my dad had learned to do it or what part it might have played in an inner life that was truly his own.

  Until he left home for college in 1943, my dad followed his dad into the predawn darkness in work clothes every morning, headed for the dairy barn or the machine shed, a map of the day and its connection to other days already in my grandfather’s mind. I barely remember seeing my grandfather at work on the farm, only an image of watching him turn in the seat of an old Farmall tractor while shelling corn in late autumn or winter. The farm, when I first knew it, was still very much what he had made it over the years, though he lived in town by then. But when he and I drove out to the farm from town, I felt acutely that I was coming as a visitor and that my grandfather was arriving himself in visitor’s clothing. His familiarity with the families, most of them relatives, who lived behind the windbreaks on the horizon, his keen appraisal of the crops in the fields and the condition of the cattle and hogs, the intimacy with which he knew the farmland itself—that was simply lost on me.

  But “intimacy” is probably not a word my grandfather would have used to describe the way he knew his land. Intimacy implies too equal a balance between farmer and farm and not enough subjection of the soil. It’s also too private a word. There’s something public about the open terrain of northwest Iowa, something public too about the progressive way my grandfather farmed, as well as the role he took in George, a town his own father, who emigrated from Germany at eighteen in 1884, had helped found. What my grandfather really possessed was an intimate acquaintance with the character of his own labor, a private, unspoken awareness of how far he could push himself, how strong he was, where he was weak, and what work gave him greatest satisfaction. The intimacy with which he knew his land was really a reflection of the intimacy with which he knew himself. Both kinds
of knowledge were tempered by self-expectation rooted in a roundly public sense of community whose social topography was defined by close kinship, the presence of so much family, so many Klinkenborgs. All these things were fostered, in one way or another, in his children.

  When I returned to California in 1978 to help my parents raise the frame of their new house, I saw that for the first time in my life, and perhaps in his life too, my dad had found a scale of living—a landscape for his labor—that matched the scale of self-expectation he had seen in his father. Dad no longer owned just a house and yard, but a place we began, half-joking, to call the ranch. Working at the building site that summer, every one of us knew that some inner tension in the family had been released, a prospect enlarged, a dead end narrowly averted. In 1966, when we arrived from Iowa, Sacramento was a rough, unreconnoitered city only apparently gentled by the presence of so many government offices. By the time my parents moved to the edge of the mountains a dozen years later, a paralytic blandness had settled over the city and its cul-de-sac suburbs, a blandness as palling as the tule fogs that blind the San Joaquin Valley every winter. But on thirteen acres high above the fog, under a canopy of ponderosa pines along the Georgetown Divide, my father rebuilt a warm-weather version of his childhood, complete with cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, tractors, and the obligation to walk out onto the land in his work clothes—a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of grease- or pitch-stained pants—every day when he was done with school. And by rebuilding his childhood he reframed the rest of my adulthood.

  If I counted all the days I spent working beside my father at the ranch over the past twenty-five years, they would total only three or four months. And if I tried to make a list of the things he taught me directly in that time, it would be a short one. There wasn’t much to teach in most of the work we did together in those years. Burning a brush pile doesn’t have many fine points. And, as we both learned long ago, my father and I are ill suited as teacher and student. He’s impatient to move on to the next job, because he has a long list of jobs to finish before lunch, and I’m impatient because I know that some expert has written a book or an article about whatever we’re doing which I can read at leisure. But every time I came home, something new had sprung up—an automated irrigation system, an apartment above the barn, a carport, a gazebo, new roof, new paint. The number of animals rose and fell and rose again. And soon, enough time had passed for decay to set in, for the first fences we built there to look run-down, like relics of a forgotten California. All the things Dad intended to do on the ranch began to coexist in an almost melancholy way with all the things he actually did.

  When you take on a property like the one my parents bought—thirteen rolling acres divided by a narrow irrigation ditch, broken by veins of rock, and covered in poison oak and head-high Scotch broom—you simply set out to clear the land and find a building site. But you leave traces of yourself with every decision you make, every fence you build, every tree you fell or plant, every quarter-acre you choose to irrigate or leave dry. In twenty years’ time, a self-portrait emerges, and it exposes all the subtleties of your character, whether you like it or not. The land and the shape of the buildings show precisely how much disorder you can tolerate, how many corners you tend to cut, how much you think you can hide from yourself. Neatness may reflect nothing more than a passion for neatness, or it may be a sign of small ambitions. And beyond the literal landscape—the one that has been tilled and planted or logged or fenced or simply let alone—there is the ideal landscape that lives only in the mind. Every day you explore the difference between the two, knowing that you can see what no one else can.

  At the ranch I could walk in a minute or two from the lightest, most orderly region of my father’s personality—the wood-shop or the apple orchard—across the irrigation ditch and down to a subliminal clutter of welding rods and oilcans and greasy tractor parts in the dark precincts of the barn. In a corner near the highway lay a part of the property my dad almost never visited, a dry, dusty tangle of raspberry brambles that must have pained him whenever he passed it on his way to the mailbox. Just a hundred yards off lay a grassy, well-watered ridge where he must have looked up from his work sometimes and marveled, as I did, at what he had made of this property. If you drove in the upper driveway, you came to a rose garden and a well-kept lawn. If you took the lower driveway, you found fuel tanks standing by a dilapidated corral, grass growing through the frame of an old sawmill, a sun-blistered camper shell resting on blocks. But I never once came to visit without seeing in those things the profusion and self-confidence of my father’s character. I hope the mess I make speaks as well of me someday.

  Dad is now seventy-six, healthy, vigorous, almost adolescent again, as seventy-six-year-olds tend to be these days. A couple of years ago, just before my stepmother’s health failed, my parents sold the ranch and moved back down the mountain to a new development on the outskirts of Sacramento. They bought a house not one stick of which they put up themselves, and my dad started saying what a relief it was to have so little yard work to do. Now that I have a small farm of my own, I almost believe him. Still, my dad added a screen porch to the new house himself. He planted tomatoes where his neighbors might have hired a gardener to plant camellias.

  It had never occurred to me that the ranch would be sold while my parents were alive. I felt the way I did when I learned that my grandmother’s house in Iowa was being put up for sale, the way I’ll feel if the home farm near George ever leaves the family. Every day I miss the ranch, not for its beauty alone, but because it was so inexpressibly of the people who made it. It was home to a part of me I didn’t know existed until the summer we built the house there. That June, my brother John and I camped out on the foundation, lying awake late at night to watch the stars overhead. My arms were tight from hammering all day long, my back brown. The thought that in a few weeks I would return to the East Coast and a life among books and letters—a life purely of my own choosing—was inadmissible. Some of Dad’s friends came to work on the house with us, and I was surprised to discover that my impatience with their ineptitude was more than matched by my father’s impatience with them too. It was the first sign in years of how much we had in common, or rather it was the first sign I was willing to accept.

  This farm of mine—these few bony acres—is the estate I’ve inherited from my father, a landscape both tangible and intangible. That’s how I think of it. It’s a way of propagating what I’ve learned about him and myself. It carries me back to a time when I was very young, standing at the edge of the garden in a small Iowa town watching him work a hive of bees. He wore white coveralls, a helmet and veil, and he stood on a stepladder because the hive was so tall, the honey flow from the surrounding farm fields so heavy. When Dad was here last June, one of the first things we did was walk down to look at the beehives on the edge of the garden. Then we worked together for a couple of days building a run-in shed for the horses. But as we set posts and measured rafters, I realized that I wanted to be building his run-in shed, not mine. I wanted to be adding another structure to a property he no longer owned, assuring a continuity of man and landscape that would last another thirty or forty years. I knew then that I would have to go on with this work alone, that someday it would have to be both father and son to me.

  July

  At first light, about four o’clock, the bats begin fluttering at the roof ridge, slipping into the house through a bat-stained crack between clapboards. It’s just enough noise to wake me up, and for a moment I lie there, watching the dark shapes against the false dawn outside. The bats nest somewhere in the ceiling above my head, just beyond a layer of Sheetrock and insulation. It’s like having a chicken coop in the rafters.

  It’s pleasant to pretend that wildness stops at the front door in the country, but it really doesn’t. In April I started seeds under a lamp in the basement, and when the seedlings were just ready to be pricked out and potted on, the mice grazed them down to bare stubs one night. A fox took a se
at in the driveway the other morning and looked at the kitchen as if he expected to come in.

  At night flying insects clatter and whir against the screen of a lighted window, and sometimes the bats pick them off the screen, their wings just brushing it as they fly past. It comes as a surprise to realize once again how full the night is with insects. Moths come flaring into the headlights like stones skipped down the highway. Last week I walked down to the mailbox long after dark. Out in the open, where the darkness lessened, I saw an atmosphere full of insects drifting past, like the metropolitan scene in a science fiction movie, airborne traffic vectoring this way and that. Twice in the past week I found the corpse of a luna moth on the ground. It seemed less like the remains of a personal moth death than the wreck of a pale green, iridescent, freight-carrying kite. As full as the air is of insects, it is that full of insect eaters too.

  But as far as I can tell, no one’s eating the slugs. We try not to. We wash the lettuce from the garden three or four times, picking over each leaf carefully before we spin it dry. The profusion of slugs this year reflects the damp, dark weather that has clung since April. Slugs are a kind of animate precipitation, aqueous sloths. The garden is flecked with them in early morning, and after I’ve tossed a few of them into the nettle patch, the revulsion they cause dies away—until one turns up on the salad plate.