The Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  The tomato cages have been toppled by the latest storm—yet more rain in a rainy summer. Japanese beetles have pinholed the raspberries and the rhubarb and the leaves of a Montmorency cherry. The roses and hollyhocks are in tatters too. It’s late summer, and I can almost feel the organic inertia overwhelming the vegetable garden—the outsized cucumbers, the bolted lettuce, the ever-bearing strawberries making their break from the raised beds. I planted the dark side of the garden in squash and pumpkins, and for a few weeks the seedlings grew hardly at all. Then in early July someone fired a starter’s gun, and the race was on. The French pumpkins have overtaken the butternut squash, and they are all bearing down in a dead heat on the hops arbor, where the hops have lapped the climbing roses. So much growth looks surprisingly like decay. The end is in sight.

  A gardener anticipates the mortality of his vegetable garden. By early fall, it’s somehow the point. My own garden nearly always ends in fresh wilderness. In autumn I stare at the demise of my spring plans and realize that the great sadness and great joy of vegetable gardening is that so few vegetables are perennial where I live. All those drawings and plottings come down to this, a cornucopia of nettles and soon-to-be-frostbit tomatoes. The fullest ambition of the northern kitchen gardener is to see the wrack of his old garden moldering in a compost heap, ripening for next spring.

  Other gardens—the kinds with conifers and obelisks and classical fountains, with avenues of pleached trees and files of boxwood—are planted in homage to continuity. But even those gardens, those enduring works of imagination and design and ambition, don’t last forever. Not long ago I came across a passage in Goethe’s journal of his voyage to Italy that says something substantial about the way even lofty gardens come to an end. The date is September 21, 1786, and Goethe is in Vicenza, still in his first intoxication with Italy. He writes:

  Today I visited Doctor Turra; for some five years he concentrated passionately on botany, assembled a herbarium of Italian flora, and, under the previous bishop, established a botanical garden. But that is all past. Natural history was replaced by medical practice, the herbarium is food for worms, the bishop is dead, and the botanical garden has been replanted, as is proper, with cabbages and garlic.

  The bishop dies, and that’s that. Under the next bishop, food for the scientist’s mind becomes food for the cleric’s stomach, “as is proper.” Goethe gives every garden its epitaph: “But that is all past.”

  So gardens end with the bishop’s death and with the worms. They end in a hard frost and in a drought. They end where the neighbor’s property begins or at the limit of the drip-irrigation line or where the woods close in. They end in a view, a wall, a border, a road, a tangle of weeds, a subdivision, or in political turmoil, a change of ownership, a reversal of fortune. They end where energy and money and ideas run out, or where the deer and woodchucks begin. They end in divorce and death. They end most happily by beginning all over again.

  And sometimes gardens end abruptly, violently, in a cataclysm, natural or otherwise. A few months ago I was reading John Ruskin’s strange, late work called Fors Clavigera, a series of long, fulminating letters addressed to “the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain,” whom he hoped to form into a utopian society called the Guild of St. George. In the fifth letter of Fors Clavigera, dated December 1871, Ruskin writes about Goethe’s theory that a plant’s parts are merely variations of each other—that, in Ruskin’s words, “all the parts of a plant had a kind of common nature, and would change into each other.” Goethe put it more succinctly. “Everything is leaf,” he wrote.

  For Ruskin the idea that “there are no such thing as Flowers—there are only gladdened Leaves” is an attractive one, but he believed that in the hands of scientists the idea became a misperception, a misreading of the plant’s purpose, which is to produce flowers. His mistrust of science is unequivocal. “You have learned,” he wrote,

  that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone—with the voice of your brother’s blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all its murderous sphere.

  As a footnote, Ruskin quotes a letter to the Times of London, dated April 5, 1871, from the great English garden designer William Robinson. Robinson had gone to Paris to see what the Franco-Prussian War had done to the gardens there. In September 1870 the German army laid siege to Paris, and during the winter the city consumed itself. Some forty thousand oxen and a quarter-million sheep grazed in the Bois de Boulogne, but they were not enough. The city grew cold and dark and hungry that winter. A French Horticultural Relief Fund had been raised to repair war damage to French gardens, but it was clear to Robinson that the money would fall far short of the need. Most of Paris’s public gardens had survived the siege, Robinson reported, but along the Avenue de l’Impératrice “a sad scene of desolation presents itself.” What was once “the finest avenue garden in existence” was now, he stated dryly, “as cheerless as Leicester Square or a sparsely furnished rubbish yard.” It was hardly surprising. “After a similar ordeal,” he wrote, “we should not have a stick left in London.”

  Grand Parisian gardens, though, weren’t the only ones to be decimated in the winter of 1870-71. “When at Vitry on the 28th of March,” Robinson noted, “I found the once fine nursery of M. Honoré Dufresne deserted, and many acres once covered with large stock and specimens cleared to the ground.” Near one village Robinson came upon an embankment built to protect an artillery battery. It was made up of “mattresses, sofas, and almost every other large article of furniture, with the earth stowed between. There were, in addition, nearly forty orange and oleander tubs gathered from the little gardens in the neighbourhood visible in various parts of this ugly bank.” Robinson wrote: “Multiply these few instances by the number of districts occupied by the belligerents during the war, and some idea of the effects of glory on gardening in France may be obtained.”

  Thoughts of war, even distant, long-forgotten wars, are the kind of thoughts that gardeners try instinctively to exclude from their meditations. So many natural forces prey upon a garden over time that it’s hardly worth thinking about the unnatural forces that might also do so, the ones that by Robinson’s estimate destroyed some two and a half million young trees around two villages near Paris in a single winter. But I find myself thinking again and again about the way Robinson links glory and gardening. “Glory” is his shorthand for military esprit, the zeal for conquest and blood sacrifice. It makes an interesting juxtaposition, glory and gardening, if not a perfect antithesis.

  I wonder, for instance, what it must have been like for a veteran of World War I, supremely a war of excavation, to have turned his first peacetime spadeful of soil in some quiet cottage garden during the spring of 1919, the first spring after the armistice. What must the bite of the spade have felt like to him? How immaculate, almost virginal, must the earth in those few square meters of home garden have seemed after the squalid soil along the front lines in France and Belgium, where large parts of former battlegrounds are still cordoned off, where bits of bone and metal, explosives and debris, are still being disinterred nearly a century later. That indeed is Ruskin’s Avenger-Earth, the evil garden.

  In December 1999 severe storms swept northern Europe and blew down some ten thousand trees at Versailles, many of them nearly two hundred years old. The news photographs of the destruction at Versailles looked like the early stages of a bombardment, the woods toppled, the earth not yet plowed into mud by the shells. But those photographs also resembled a pair of eighteenth-century paintings by the artist and garden designer Hubert Robert. When Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, the various woods at Versailles, the bosquets, were in terrible repair. They had been planted with mature trees ripped from forests in Compiègne and Normandy at the end of the seventeenth century. It fell to the new king to
undo his predecessors’ neglect, and he ordered the removal of several of the old bosquets and the planting of new groves in a less formal, English style.

  Robert, whose patron was also one of the king’s horticultural counselors, was commissioned to paint two different scenes of the destruction, both of which were exhibited in 1777. One is called View of Apollo’s Wood During the Felling of the Trees. Robert was famous for his love of architectural ruins, but in this painting the ruins are botanical. Apollo’s Wood is a scene of industry and chaos. A work crew tugs at a rope attached well up the trunk of a tree being felled. A sawyer works his way along the length of a downed tree. Men of military demeanor survey the scene, as do ladies of fashion.

  The more interesting painting of that event is Robert’s view of the felling of trees near the Tapis Vert, with a glimpse of the Grand Canal receding into the distance. Children play on an impromptu seesaw. Woodsmen and their axes rest against the base of a statue and the carcass of a tree. The king and queen stand in the right foreground, looking over the arboreal upheaval. Somehow there’s a tension in this painting that’s missing in its companion piece. Partly it’s the grotesquerie of the trees themselves—enormous hulks of wood—towering over the colonnade in the distance, over great urns, over a statue of Milo of Crotona being devoured by a lion, his hand caught in the trunk of a tree. It’s a scene right out of William Gaddis’s JR, where trees “appeared to stagger without even provocation of a breeze, rearing their splintered amputations in all directions.”

  But the real tension in this painting comes from the presence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They transform this scene of destruction and revelry into a moment of overlap between two worlds, that of the woodsmen, axes at rest, and that of the king and his consort, who would feel the blade on their necks some seventeen years later. The interest of the painting is its faint horror, the sense of botanical carnage and social inversion, even though what Robert witnesses is a new approach to order, a reinvestment in the park, and workmen resting under the eyes of their employer and king. It’s a view of peaceable destruction, but in the very restoration of those bosquets there is also a glimpse of the end of the lineage that planted them, though Robert could not have known it.

  That moment in Versailles—the felling of those trees—was merely a minor adjustment in a garden that even then belonged to history, a garden already more than a century old. Robert’s painting is both a documentary and a Shakespearean fantasy, a comedy in which the court ventures into a wood where disorder prevails, where ruin is imminent but always forestalled, where decay suggests not the past but the future. Catherine the Great, who tried unsuccessfully to bring Robert to Russia, remarked that he preferred to live in what she called a land of ruins, which is what revolutionary France would become. Denis Diderot, the art critic and Encyclopedist, tried to explain the psychological effect of Robert’s fascination with ruins. It was, he said, a fascination with endings and the transformation they bring. “How old the world is!” Diderot imagined Robert thinking. “I walk between two eternities.”

  Yet the world isn’t old for everyone, and on the American plains the two eternities aren’t past and future, but grass and sky. I have my own personal pendant to Robert’s painting. It’s a print of a work called Spring in Town, painted by Grant Wood at the end of his life. The scene is the harvest of one’s own labor, set on the edge of a small Iowa town. Quilts hang on a laundry line. Two men beat a carpet spread on the grass. A young girl bends the bough of a cherry tree in blossom. The painting is dominated by a broad-backed, shirtless young man turning the soil with a garden fork. He is nearly as large as the white-spired church rising on a hill at the edge of town, and he could have posed as Milo of Crotona. The geometry of his unplanted garden, as well as its tilth, is perfect, altered only by a row of irises. The compost of last year’s vegetation has already been spread. The formalism of Versailles—a monarchical, absolutist vision of garden geometry—has been pared down to this democratic, self-reliant vision of gardening.

  I’ve looked at this print almost daily for years—I come from a place like this modest town—and only now do I see that there is an ending here too. The year of this painting is 1941. A war is already being fought in Europe. Before this man can choose seeds for next year’s garden—a Victory Garden by then—he will be gone, called to war, his annual tilling delayed perhaps forever.

  On the first Friday after that sudden Tuesday, I took an afternoon train back homeward out of Manhattan and into the country. Do you remember the day? The clouds were pulling apart in the distance, exposing blue sky along the western horizon. The streets of Harlem took the light and held it, their brick buildings seeming almost to swell with solidity. In the substance of those streets and the surface of the river and the embrace of the railroad bridge into the Bronx, there was a profound, material comfort. “Material” is the important word. The world into which I was passing exuded nothing but its own repose. It had no news to deliver, or rather only the old, inarticulate news that bricks and water and steel have always delivered.

  After a while I reached my stop and drove north along a highway through the cornfields. Here too I felt the same thing, that there was a mute voice in the extreme order of those rows of corn, in the rasp of their drying leaves against each other. The round bales in the hayfields looked like a gathering point for shadows. The trees slipped by dispassionately.

  It’s often possible to look at a rural landscape and feel that you’re being drawn into it, that what you see in the distance somehow tugs you outward along the line of sight. But this was just the opposite. The countryside seemed to pour itself down into the windows of the pickup, the empty corncribs, the neat stacks of firewood, the mellifluous pastures on the highest hillsides. At home the horses and dogs consoled me in a way I couldn’t understand, until I finally realized that they could not be told what had happened that week. In that fact lay the consolation. They had only the old news to give, their old satisfaction with the world as they know it.

  Life is bearing witness. In some superficial sense the morning of September 11 sifted us all into different circles of witnessing. Some people narrowly escaped the collapsing towers. Others watched in terrified safety from windows and rooftops farther uptown. Many, like me, saw it live on television from midtown, while an incalculable number of people around the country and the world watched as the tapes were replayed into the night and the coming days. But we’re all witnesses, no matter what we saw or how we saw it. Our burden is very different from the burden the victims bore and their families still bear, but it’s no less real.

  Witnessing is a matter of knowledge and of conscience. We know what we saw, and yet we watch the televised tapes play over and over again because we disbelieve what we know. We also watch because it feels as if we’re attesting to history, denouncing a crime, renewing a commitment, and also because to break off watching feels like a betrayal. It’s hard to know, just yet, whether for each of us this witnessing has caused an erosion or a sedimentation, a stripping away of the skin or a callusing. But paradoxical as it may sound, to continue to bear witness, in conscience, it may be necessary to stop watching for a while, to turn off the television, to break what for some people has become a self-reinforcing circle of despair.

  There’s no abiding consolation at the moment. But the clouds do sometimes pull apart, if only temporarily. The day after I got home, I stopped by a small lumber mill to pick up some siding that the owner had cut for a chicken house I’m building. It was the sort of day we’ve been having plenty of, luminous and deep. The owner waved from behind a metal grinder that was throwing off sparks and pointed me toward the mill. On its wooden rails lay my lumber, smooth, fragrant planks of pine, scalloped and grooved to fit together the way so few things seemed to be doing elsewhere. I ran my hand down their lengths, felt the light flouring of sawdust on each board, and for the moment thought of nothing else.

  I was in Eads, Colorado, just passing through, which is true of nearly ever
yone who has ever come to Eads. The town lies on a major truck route across southeastern Colorado. What Eads takes from that truck route is hard to tell. A few people stop now and then at Shepp’s drive-in, on the edge of town. Plastic lambs line the windowsills, and you can read a religious magazine called Guideposts while you wait for lunch, for the full name of Shepp’s is the Good Sheppard Inn.

  But only the locals turn off the truck route and onto the main street of Eads. On one side lies the Crow-Luther Arts Center, which used to be the Plains movie theater. Its marquee says, almost ironically, THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE FINE ARTS. One of the E’S has blown sideways in the wind.

  Across the street and down a little is the Kiowa County Museum, an old-fashioned brick building with a concrete stoop. Inside you can see the optimistic plat that was laid out for Eads many decades ago, a grid of house lots marching off in all directions. You can see a few collections of arrowheads and some old-fashioned kitchen equipment—a couple of pressure cookers and a wood-fired stove. One room is devoted to a frightening display of antiquated medical equipment. There’s a room full of cowboy gear and a photograph of the record corn harvest before dust obscured the future of agriculture in Kiowa County. The pathos lies not in the objects themselves but in what you would need to know about the life at hand to give them their real meaning, a knowledge not readily available to passersby.

  But on one wall, even a stranger could decipher the whole story. Leaning against the wall was the side panel of a school bus from seventy years ago. Above it hung the receipt the county coroner submitted for mileage costs. There were banner headlines and the photographs of five children. They had boarded a bus after school with fifteen other children on March 26, 1931, in Towner, Colorado, a small town almost on the Kansas line. The bus was caught in deepening snowfall a few miles south of Towner, caught in the kind of spring blizzard that ranchers dread. Some panes of glass were missing in the school bus, and snow drifted in. By the time the children were rescued, at noon two days later, five were dead. The body of the bus driver was found in the open fields, his hands badly lacerated from trying to follow a fence line to summon help.