Until this summer, I’d never heard of spotted touch-me-not, which is also called jewelweed and whose botanical name is Impatiens capensis. It has a delicate slipper-shaped flower—orange, spotted, almost Shakespearean—which dangles from a slender stalk. Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide calls the stem of the plant “succulent,” a word which applied to roast fowl means “mouth-watering,” but which used in reference to spotted touch-me-not means something like “sickeningly replete with plant juice.” The name touch-me-not is ironic, when you consider that the sap of this plant is often used to ease the irritation of poison ivy. The name comes from the fruit, “a plump pod,” says Newcomb, “that explodes when ripe.” In other words, trouble. Profligate trouble too, judging from the quantity of spotted touch-me-not that grows here.
I sat on the back porch one morning with a cup of coffee, trying not to look at the decrepit porch posts. A tendril of wild cucumber spiraled upward from the branch of a peach tree. I walked down to the peach and removed the vine. I followed a path mown through the weeds to the beehive. On the way, I tugged reflectively upon a spotted touch-me-not. It came up easily. An hour and a half later, I had pulled up one of the jewelweed jungles on this place, succulence oozing from the stems, which do extract easily if you lift straight up. If you tug at an angle, they snap off at their bulbous joints with a sound like stale celery being broken. These are the kinds of things you learn when you pursue the illogic of owning an old house. You solve small problems as they come to your attention in hopes that the big problems will solve themselves.
In the ragged, harsh light of noon, the house and grounds look starkly flawed. But as the light tarries into a long July evening, I find myself counting the months and years we’ve been here and marveling at the changes that have taken place in that time. What still impresses me are the things that impressed me when we first came here—the sugar maples riding on a ridge of stone between two pastures, the grace of the hickories that surround the house, the soft-shoe strut of the turkeys as they come down from the woods. But the work we’ve done, reseeding pasture, rationalizing the fences, planting roses and apples and pears, begins to factor into my pleasure more and more. And what I notice now is that while the life around it swells with summer, rising and ebbing like a green tide, the house stands firm on its footing of stone, almost indifferent. While the herbage around it riots on midsummer nights—the wisteria fingering every weakness in foundation and porch—the house, like its owners, quietly adds another to its load of years.
August
The second cutting of hay has been postponed because the farmers can’t get into the fields. If August goes on the way July has, the horses will have to eat hostas, which have never looked more prosperous. Everything fungal is having a high time of it. On yet another wet morning, with the rain disguised temporarily as fog, the bees hung in sodden mats from the hive entrances. The sky has been the color of auto primer all week long. The old metaphors for night’s arrival fail. It doesn’t “come,” it doesn’t “fall.” The sun doesn’t “set.” The clouds merely obtrude themselves until darkness is complete. The dogs, who are photosensitive for food, expect five o’clock supper at noon.
And so July ended. It’s been like living under a rhubarb leaf. In parts of the Northeast, the month’s average rainfall fell in a single day, disbelief rising like water in the storm drains as hour after hour passed with no letup, the runoff gouging out driveways and washing out fields, stunting already stunted corn. The average daily temperature for July was colder than normal by nearly 4½ degrees in New York City, or colder by nearly 8½ degrees than last July, when we were all complaining about the insufferable heat. It goes to show how finely attuned to normal the human organism really is, what keen thermostats we keep within us. At the same time, it makes normal seem like an unapproachable ideal, a figment of the statistician’s imagination.
At a certain point, no matter how long it rains, you just have to give up and go with it. I weed in the rain and pick blackberries and blueberries in the rain. I’ve seen people mowing in the rain, wearing bright yellow slickers and moving quickly to keep the blades from jamming with wet grass. I harvested the garlic in the garden not long ago and then found myself wondering where I could possibly hang it to dry. Walking up the sunken road that runs past our house, I came upon a great blue heron airing its feet on the gravel crown. A red-tailed hawk hung mewing in the current high overhead, just to feel the breeze.
Above the hawk and above the cloud cover the sun is shining brightly, tipping now toward evening and Scorpio’s rise. I think of a kind of photomachy going on up there, a struggle between light and dark, the sun trying to pierce the clouds, while the clouds, infinitely mutable, block the sun’s energies. It’s something Rubens would paint, a masterpiece of effulgence and protuberance, a Baroque battle scene in whose shadow the ordinary lives of ordinary people go steadily on, while they wait to see how it will all turn out.
Wyoming is a metropolis of clouds. Some are born in the state, some move here from other places, but they all prosper, because Wyoming is also a theater of wind. For days at a time this summer, the clouds have passed in migratory flight, complicating the sunlight. In late afternoon especially, along the northeastern rim of the Bighorn Mountains, great rafts of orographic clouds—shaped by the mountains, that is—rise with the terrain and then lean out over the creek bottoms, darkening the face of the Bighorns and reabsorbing that darkness.
It’s been a wet summer in Wyoming, and rich in cloud life. Hay bales have been stacked in pyramids in the fields to keep the damp off, and the barley has gone unirrigated. Often enough, when morning dawns, the dogs run up the hayfield road, inhaling and exhaling cloud, until they vanish into even grayness.
Those are the usual summer days, which often turn cloudless by noon. They end with lightning flickering all around the night horizon, the storms so distant that they lie beneath the constellation Scorpio, which never gets very high in the sky this far north. But along the road from Cheyenne to Sheridan a squall line blew in from the open prairie to the east, an ominous, upward-thrusting shield of precipitation. The temperature dropped nearly thirty degrees, and the rain fell against the direction of the wind so heavily that drivers pulled off the road, turned off their wipers, and watched the lightning take dead aim around them.
Twenty miles down the road, the temperature rose as much as it had fallen. The squall line broke apart into a landscape of sky that beggared the landscape of earth. Clouds congealed into innumerable shapes, each requiring its own analogy. Shards of flint and flakes of obsidian knifed through the middle atmosphere. Mammatus clouds, as smoothly pebbled as a low-water beach, clung to the underside of thunderheads, while pileus clouds—the name means skullcap—clung to their tops.
Some clouds had become castellated, and others had been beaten into sheets of lead or folded back upon themselves again and again like Damascus steel. The galactic gas jets of the deep universe were present and so were the nebulae. So too was the tight, blue-tinted hairdo of a matron marching westward in dudgeon across the sky. She canted over the sagebrush flats, hit an updraft, and was teased into nothingness.
I’ve been stung by nettles so often this summer that my hands have reached a state of continuous numbness—not so numb, however, that I can’t feel the next nettle bite. I go down without gloves to the vegetable garden in early morning when the dew is still thick, planning only to drink my coffee and watch the potatoes grow. But new nettles have always sprung up overnight, and old ones that lay hidden in the hops reveal themselves in the low sun. I can’t help plucking them, even barehanded. Weeds of the Northeast, that indispensable book, prints a lurid photo of a nettle’s stinging hairs. It adds, “When the tip of the hair is broken off on contact with the skin, it acts as a hypodermic needle, injecting the toxins histamine, acetylcholine, and 5-hydroxytryptamine into the wound.” Nettles prefer rich soil, so I acknowledge the compliment and heave them onto the compost pile.
On a terrace above the potato
es, a pumpkin plant has wound its way into the sweet corn. So have the vines of the cherry tomatoes, some winter squash, and three cucumber plants—two cukes too many. I step into this maze of vines and stalks every day just to enjoy its architecture and to admire the clutching and grasping going on in the narrow dirt streets beneath the cornstalks. This part of the garden isn’t the least bit pastoral. All the vining plants have their hackles up. Their leaves and stems bristle and rasp against the skin as I shift them about, while trying not to step on the cucumbers, which are armored with stiff spurs. The common mellifluousness of spring’s new growth is long gone. Everyone in the garden is a character now, for better or worse.
Ripeness is just a form of specialization, or a specialization of form. Either way, it’s descending upon this garden quickly now, like dusk creeping a little nearer every day. It seems like an incredible extravagance to wait so long, so patiently, for an ear of sweet corn or a ripe tomato. The wait is nearly over. I almost expect a pause when ripeness comes, but the garden will rush forward into senescence, or rather into its own definition of ripeness instead of mine. A broccoli has already bolted. The pea vines are stiff and brown. The pole beans have begun to wilt. Japanese beetles have eaten nearly all of the Virginia creeper that steals from the upper garden into the lower one. Only the nettles continue to come up spring green every day, the nettles, the lamb’s-quarters, and the jewelweed.
This is a good hopper year in the West, if you happen to like hoppers, a year of subscourge abundance. In an unscientific study conducted late last afternoon, I discovered that if you walk with two dogs across a level, sixty-acre Wyoming pasture, you kick up a gross of hoppers with every step, never mind what the dogs dislodge. One of the dogs, a yellow mutt, lunges at the hoppers that leap into her path, mouths them, and spits them out, blinking. The other dog is too stately for hoppers. When horses walk through the tall, dry grass, they lower their heads and weave them back and forth, watching the insects fan out beneath their feet, listening to the sudden eruption, which sounds like high wind among brittle leaves or the very distant call of a kingfisher.
The birds love the sudden proliferation. You usually see robins tugging at earthworms as though they were anchor chains, but now the robins run along the edges of gravel roads, picking off hoppers as they go. There’s a lot of extra protein available, which is good for the grouse and pheasants and good for the trout patrolling the stream banks. In the morning, as the sun is getting strong, the hoppers climb from the high grass onto the eastern walls of ranch buildings, where they wait until they’re fully charged, ready to go off. They’re easy to capture in the morning.
A grasshopper will cling to the end of your finger, trying always to keep itself out of the line of sight. Seen in profile, there’s a muted, almost Italianate beauty to a grasshopper. It looks embossed, machined, any one of its body parts raised only slightly above the others. A rich herringbone pattern runs along the enormous thigh, and the stubby, segmented antennae darken outward from the head to a deep sienna. Look near enough and it’s possible to see your own reflection in the impassive, oval eye.
I wonder what the ants make of it all. Somehow, out here in the West, the grasshopper seems more sympathetic than he does in the old fable. The difference between an ant and a grasshopper is that a grasshopper believes in posterity while an ant prefers immediate family. What’s so improvident about grazing all summer, waiting for wings, and then laying dozens of eggs that will hatch when winter has come and gone and you’ve come and gone with it? Somehow, out here, it seems preferable to expire alone on the high prairie, as a grasshopper will, than to die, as the ants do, in a hole among many thousands of your kind.
A few days ago, at the edge of a desolate mall in New York’s Mohawk Valley, I saw a young Amish woman sitting on the back end of a horseless carriage—horseless because the horse was elsewhere. She was selling sweet corn. Everyone is selling sweet corn right now and selling it with an almost touching earnestness, knowing that this is the season of sweet corn glut. I’ve come across a few ears and a coffee can for a cash till lying on a board beside a garden. I’ve seen children’s wagons mounded with dark ears parked on the sidewalk. At some of the bigger roadside stands, it looks as if the proprietors were really selling brown paper bags and using the corn to hold them up. The bags absorb the moisture the corn gives off and collapse while being carried into the house. Everyone says the best way to prepare sweet corn is to remove it from the stalk, husk it on the way to the kitchen, and drop it into already boiling water. I get good results if I drive it home, drop it on the lawn when the bag breaks, and then prepare as usual.
In a place like the Mohawk Valley, where some large-scale farming is still being done, sweet corn is nearly always being sold within sight of fields full of field corn, the kind marked near the fence line by a seed company sign and a number. The number registers the type of seed planted there, which may be, among other possibilities, a white, yellow, high-oil, extractable-starch, or silage corn. The number also marks a way out of the trap that sweet corn inventors are in, who are obliged to think up names like Bodacious, Calico Belle, Maverick, and Zenith.
The roadside sweet corn grows in patches, gardens, and, sometimes, a good-sized stand of plowed ground. The dent corn, the stuff in the fields, grows in landscapes. It’s as much architecture as agriculture, an architecture that has grown more and more grandiose. In an Amish field, I saw a horse-drawn one-row corn picker. Here and there, abandoned along fence lines, you sometimes see rusted four- and eight-row pickers—the kind that fit over the cowl of a tractor like some kind of medieval horse armor. Out in the irrigated corn forests of central Nebraska, there are corn-picking heads for combines that are far too wide for the highways.
Forty years ago, the field corn seemed widely spaced and somehow personable enough to hide in, the way Cary Grant did in North by Northwest. You couldn’t edge your way into some modern fields. The corn they’re seeded with comes in pallets full of bags holding 80,000 kernels each and plants out at around 30,000 kernels per acre. In the dense river-bottom fields along the Mohawk River, all that corn is nearing a biological climax. It won’t be picked for another two months, but it’s now coming into the last of the green, those final weeks before the leaves and stalks begin the slow browning of autumn. Every field looks like an army of aspirants, leaves flung skyward in a kind of hosanna.
I was stung by a honeybee on the back of the head while weeding in the garden one afternoon. There was nothing surprising about being stung, since upward of 100,000 bees live about thirty feet from where I was working. I could hear the droning of the hives and smell the sweet, waxy scent that emanates from a healthy colony. The air high above my head was thick with bee traffic homing downward out of the east at a velocity that’s not easily credible unless you’ve actually seen it. Still, I resented being stung. “After all I’ve done for you,” was my first thought, a sign that I haven’t quite matured as a beekeeper. But it wasn’t even the sting that I resented. It was the slap of an angry bee—a suicidal bee—against my scalp and the knowledge that she had decided at a distance to poison me.
I was stooped over in the weeder’s posture, left forearm resting on my left knee, right hand wrapped around a rosette of burdock leaves, my head exposed only in that small half-moon between the back of the baseball cap I was wearing and its adjustable strap. I had decided the burdock was a weed, and the bee had decided I was a threat. The bee sting flared up with that familiar white heat and then faded abruptly away. Unless you’re allergic, it’s much more satisfying to be stung by a bee than by a mosquito. There’s none of that cautious, reluctant, hovering parasitism—that sneaking effort to steal some blood and then fly away. What a bee is really good at is transmitting hostility.
I must have looked like a bear to that bee. The beekeepers I know have trouble with bears, which take an almost orgiastic pleasure in scattering a hive’s contents. When a bear visits an apiary, it looks as though the bear planted a bomb and then retreat
ed to the edge of the woods to detonate it. Perhaps bears like the salt of the stings as much as they love the sweet of the honey and the taste of the wax and the white brood lying in their cells. We haven’t seen any bears around here—yet—largely because of a busy road and horses and dogs and an electric fence. That doesn’t keep the bees from being bear-wary in their ancestral way.
But late one night not long ago—one of the most beautiful nights this summer—a black bear crossed the road just in front of us as we were driving home through southern Vermont. It was the fragile end of dusk. Out of thick, sloping cover on the far side of the road, the bear burst at a lope, visible for only as long as it took to clear the road. But that was long enough to see that its fur was the same color as the night sky and that the gloss on its fur had the same effect as stars shining out in the night. We coasted through its vapor trail, and if we could have, we would have smelled its very bearness. It was the only thing to think about all the rest of the way home.
For the past few years I’ve driven west every summer, and every summer the question returns: Where does the West begin? There are plenty of commonsense answers, the kind that break this country up into regions as neatly defined as the pieces in a child’s wooden puzzle. If it were just a matter of political boundaries, I wouldn’t look for the West before the Colorado border. And if it were just a matter of mood, the West would begin in upstate New York on the day I walk the horses into the horse trailer, check the running lights one more time, and pull away into the fog of dawn.
The Rural Life Page 10