The Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  One second the brown drakes were not there—and then there they were, fluttering up and down at head height above the Gibbon, appearing in twos and threes and then in dozens, knotting and unknotting as they mated. We were ready, waiting only for the flies to settle onto the water and cause the big brown trout living in the Gibbon to feed. The brown drakes rose and fell, rose and fell, always a little nearer to the river’s surface. We looked on with a certain tension, trying at once to watch the mayflies and all of the visible river, as though it were an unmoving plane of light. Then the mayflies vanished—who knew where or why?—and the Gibbon began to flow again. We walked to the highway, where a cow elk wearing a radio collar grazed in the abrupt glow of flashbulbs.

  Throughout history, the moon has been a byword for mutability, its inconstancy an emblem of the inconstancy of human affairs. One night it rises dark, a new moon. One night a sliver of it hangs in the western sky, nearly catching Venus within its horns. One night it lies distended on the eastern horizon, not a sphere but a flattened disk slipping out of Earth’s shadow. On no two consecutive nights has it ever risen at the same time or in the same shape. Even now, thirty years after humans first set foot on the moon, it still seems natural to attribute these qualities to the orb itself and not to the perspective we view it from.

  Those who were alive then, a generation ago, will remember many things about that night, July 20, 1969. The moon was a waxing crescent that just suggested the contours of its dark limb. Where skies were clear and dark, people walked outdoors and gazed at the moon, then walked back inside and looked at the scratchy black-and-white TV transmission from the landing site on the Sea of Tranquillity, then walked back outside again. Of all the imaginative leaps that occurred during the preparations for Apollo 11, and during the Mercury and Gemini projects, none were as difficult, because none were as abrupt, as the imaginative leap that ordinary people faced when confronted with the fact of a moon landing. And who is to say which part of that leap was harder? Realizing that two men really stood at that moment upon the moon? Recognizing the technical virtuosity and determination that had made it possible? Or understanding, for one unsettling instant, that we too, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, stood upon a sphere hurtling through the darkness of space?

  If people groped to understand what it all meant while it was actually happening, we’re still groping thirty years later. The iconic simplicity of that moment—Neil Armstrong’s leap onto the moon’s surface—has obscured the technical complexity, the sheer engineering will, that lay behind it. The photograph of the first American flag on the moon’s surface, standing stiffly against the void of deep space, no longer suggests to us, as it did to some at the time, that America in 1969 was a nation at war with Vietnam and with itself. Looking back, I find myself wondering how it was possible to send a man from the turbulent America of the 1960s all the way to the Sea of Tranquillity.

  What’s most surprising about the events of that night long ago is that they’re more surprising now than they were then. The breathlessness of the moment itself has subsided into mere fact. But in its place, an inescapable question has emerged. Who were we then that such a thing was possible?

  There’s no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you’ll learn is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. When it comes to horses, only three things matter, patience, observation, and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died not long ago in Northern California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

  Dorrance was ninety-three, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, Ray Hunt, and Buck Brannaman, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe you’re superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero—the Spanish cowboy of eighteenth-century California—he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.

  There’s no codifying what Bill Dorrance knew. Some of it, like how to braid a rawhide lariat, is relatively easy to teach, and some of it, thanks to the individuality of horses and humans, can’t be taught at all, only learned. His legacy is exceedingly complex and self-annulling. It’s an internal legacy. The more a horseman claims to have learned from Dorrance, the less likely he is to have learned anything at all. That sounds oblique, but it reflects the fact that what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but which extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle, and people. If you really learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

  There’s no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by systematizing or popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You can’t sell modesty or undying curiosity. It’s hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

  This has been a rare grass year in parts of north-central Wyoming, in the drainages east of the Bighorn Mountains. As one rancher put it, “You couldn’t have dialed the rains in better.” The rain fell, the grass grew, the sun came out, the grass cured, and in the early weeks of July there was a kind of tonsorial fever on the hayground watered by Piney Creek, Clear Creek, and Prairie Dog Creek—men and women neatly scissoring the grass with machine-driven sickle blades. The windrows, long lines of cut grass drying in the sun, stood almost laughably high. If the profits of ranching lay in good grass instead of the vagaries of the cattle market, these ranchers would have been rich, their prosperity numbered in round bales, square bales, and enormous loaves of grass.

  Everyone seemed to feel the abundance. At the Sheridan Fairgrounds a ranch roping took place one Sunday morning, a leisurely horseback competition based on the work cowboys do when branding or doctoring cattle. Once a steer was roped, head and heels, it became another rider’s job to step off his horse and lay the steer down and release the ropes. But this summer the yearling steers were so fat they had no flanks to lie down upon. They lolled and bellowed and showed their great grass-fed bellies to the small crowd in the grandstand, then trotted nimbly away to rejoin the herd. Outside Sheridan, a band of riders on newly broken colts rode through an uncut field of grass, the seedheads brushing against chaps and saddles and raising the sound of the wind. Riders began to sneeze and the colts to fidget, not yet broken to the sound of sneezing.

  Along every road, every path, a fringe of opulent grasses grew, ligules shading into lacquered purple, blades into the blue of dusk, awns into an almost roanlike coloration. In the waste clearings grew foxtail barley—supple, iridescent. Sagebrush rose along the fence lines in sharp-scented thunderheads. South of Sheridan, near Ucross, the hayfields are edged with sloughs, and in uncut pastures, yellow-headed blackbirds hovered momentarily before settling onto grass heads that dipped slowly beneath their weight. A buckskin horse at liberty in one of the unmowed fields showed only his back and ears, an island of contentment.

  From the time the dew dried in midmorning until full dark, the windrowers moved across the fields, following the curves of the creek bottoms and the sidehills, laying the grass out in narrow rows like the isobars on a weather map. The balers followed once the grass had dried, and for a few days birds gathered on the tops of the round bales lying in the fields, looking out over a terrain that had lost muc
h of its softness.

  Then the machines came again—bale stackers for the small bales, farm trucks and tractors with hay forks for the round bales. On nearly every ranch, the hay was laid in stacks and rows where it would serve as a windbreak, a levee, in more ways than one, against winter, which suddenly seemed that much nearer once the fields were bare.

  I’m writing from a screened-in porch on the north side of a house in Big Horn, Wyoming. The screens—ten panels framed in dark green—have decayed over the years. Some have ragged holes in them. Some have sagged, the result of weather and age. But each retains its power to granulate the world outside, to heighten the contrast between deep shade and the full sun on the leaves. When a finch lands on a near bough, it’s like watching a Chinese painting come to life, the interwoven texture of the paper visible beneath the brush strokes. When late afternoon arrives and sunlight hits the screens, you can see only the glow of the screens themselves.

  A line of saplings grows near the porch, and beyond the saplings runs a creek, and beyond the creek there’s a horse pasture shaded by mature cottonwoods. The other night at twilight, as the birds were giving way to the bats, the robins set up a distracted whirring in the tallest of the cottonwoods. A great horned owl had settled on a bare bough and was calling, with a thin screech, to two more owls farther down the pasture. The screens on the porch had already deepened the night, turning the owl into a silhouette, slowly bobbing its head and shouldering its wings up around its ears.

  It wasn’t enough, finally, to watch from the porch. I walked out into the open air, down the pasture road, recapturing the full resolution of the darkening world, reveling in the fineness, the particularity, of sight. The owl in the tree, watching back with a gaze as keen as a dog’s nose, was a soft, gray oval, barely discernible from the bark of the cottonwood in which it sat. It cried all night long, as did its fellows, and in the morning they were gone.

  In central Iowa the corn is head-high. It runs in perfect regimen right up to the ditches, where cattails and horsetail grass grow. No need for fences here, for there are few dissenters in a field of corn. On some farms the upright corn leaves are as dull as old paint. On others they seem to glisten, and a driver passing by at high speed in the seat of a pickup truck catches a scattered reflection skimming over the acres of seed corn like a school of fish rushing across a saltwater flat. The geometry of farming seems, if anything, a little purer in the soybean fields, where the black earth flickers between the rows. The bean fields are very clean, not a weed in sight. They are miracles of suppression as much as miracles of yield.

  The gene for orderliness is visible all along the Iowa stretch of the Lincoln Highway. Near Jefferson the beans carry the trait of neatness to the edge of town, and then the headstones take over, and then the lawns and flower beds, which appear to have been mowed with barber shears and weeded with tweezers.

  At the corner of Chestnut Street, a trompe l’oeil mural was painted nearly thirty years ago on the side of a building that now houses Mary Ann’s Dress Shop. The mural is a view of Jefferson from out of town to the east, and it confronts a driver who has just come in from that direction with the illusion of being back where he was five minutes ago. In the painting the thunderheads are piled high, as they were one evening this week, reproducing perfectly the sensation of being squashed bug-flat by the heat.

  It was so hot that night that the only thing to do was to sit in the air-conditioned pickup cab, listen to the radio, and drink root beer while the sun went bust. Across the road a few intrepid fairgoers had gathered at the Greene County fairgrounds to watch cars race on a dirt-track oval of fertile loam. The air filled with the chainsaw throttling of the cars. Songs came and went, the root beer got stale, and the air-conditioning could barely keep time with the heat, which seemed to be thickening as the darkness grew.

  In late April a neighbor harrowed and seeded our pasture with a mixture of orchard grass, bird’s-foot trefoil, clover, and rye. For weeks I looked out on a field that was uniformly brown, all its undulations exposed to view. In the silence that ensued when planting was done, I imagined a flock of starlings—a soot-storm of birds—landing on that newly planted soil and devouring every seed. That didn’t happen. But as the days passed and the bare earth remained bare, I began to fear I’d neglected some vital organic precondition—a trace mineral, perhaps. Then a blush of green appeared. It was visible only if you looked across the field, and not too directly either. Faint stars at night are more easily seen if you don’t stare right at them, and the same was true of the green in that field. The new shoots seemed to retire from sight if you stood right over them, questioning.

  Now the pasture has been mowed once and refenced, and last night I let the horses wander through it for an hour, hock-deep in green grass. Instead of stopping to graze in any single spot, they walked briskly with their heads down, snatching a mouthful here and there as they moved. July is a month when the profusion of nature seems unbelievable, more abundant than the most verdant January daydream. The embankment bordering the gravel road is an indiscriminate, tufted mass of green. When I reset the steel T-posts around the pasture, I found a white-spun cocoon under every insulator. A caucus of earwigs had convened in the hollow behind a plastic insulator nailed to a black locust post. I took down a tent that had been standing at the edge of the woods and found that, near the summit of the tent dome, tiny ants had nested in a section of fiber-glass tent pole. It was full of eggs.

  In an essay called “Huckleberries,” written in 1861, Henry Thoreau wrote, “Let us try to keep the new world new, and while we make a wary use of the city, preserve as far as possible the advantages of living in the country.” Thoreau was talking about the need to preserve wild land not only in remote districts, but in the immediate neighborhood of our towns, to set aside “common possession” in rivers, waterfalls, lakes, hills, cliffs, and even “single ancient trees.” “I do not think him fit,” Thoreau said, “to be the founder… of a town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates, as it were, for oxen chiefly.”

  I admit that in my pasture I’ve been legislating for oxen. I understand Thoreau’s broader point. I remain wary of the city and well aware of the advantages of living in the country. But in July, when the forest closes overhead and the air hums with the unceasing drone of insects and the pasture thickens daily underfoot, it’s hard not to feel that the new world has indeed become new again. Nature does its part with an exuberance that chastens all of us.

  No lot is too small for delusions of grandeur. I’m thinking of Wemmick, the law clerk in Dickens’s Great Expectations. His house in Walworth “was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.” Behind the house and its drawbridge lived a pig and fowls and rabbits. There was a cucumber frame and an ornamental lake with a fountain, which “played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.” To Pip, the young hero of that novel, Wemmick said, “I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of All Trades.”

  And when it comes to delusions of grandeur, I’m thinking of myself too, and of the nearly five acres that surround this house—ledges of rock, stands of hardwood, and open pasture. A garden is a form of managed competition, but in what remained of ours, after four years of neglect, the gloves had been removed and the ornamentals were duking it out. In a bed along the stone portico, the peonies and phlox overcame the daffodils in late spring and were now suffocating a few goosenecks and bee balms. Poppies straggled through a carpet of snow-on-the-mountain, and in front of the kitchen deck azaleas jostled against each other like cattle in a loading chute. A lilac had vaulted the roofline. The forsythia had gone insane. Where there had once been a kitchen garden, we found a few plastic plant labels—peppers mostly—littering the ground beneath a voracious thicket of mint. Everywhere the cultivars were losing to the wild species, to sumac and wild grape and wild
cucumber and bindweed.

  With all the clearing and pruning we had to do, not to mention waiting to see what would come up on its own, I still found myself, in April, planning a vegetable garden where I could sun myself in mid-July and say, as Wemmick did, “If you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.” When a demolition crew tore out the old fences, they improved the drainage in the barnyard by scraping away some topsoil, which they gathered and spread in the lee of a stone embankment, where I wanted my garden to grow. It was fertile stuff, loam of loams. I set a bench beside that quadrangle of intense, naked soil and began a beehive nearby, in the partial shade of an elderberry. The quality of my day-dreams was superb.

  Now it’s late July, and I can’t imagine where the time went. I got busy putting up horse fence and trying not to think about the roof or the siding on the house. When I thought about the vegetable garden again, it was just a couple of days ago. I missed pea-planting time this year—early April, the soil cold but workable—and the next time I looked up I had a garden full of purple deadnettle, stinging nettles, pale smartweed, common St.-John’s-wort, and spotted touch-me-not, with a border of burdock and an occasional vervain thrown in. I understood for the first time that there’s such a thing as defensive gardening, that planting corn and tomatoes and onions is also a way of forestalling the spread of unwanted species. If you don’t plant, the earth will bear anyhow.