That morning I had lit a brush pile on fire. There was a raucous half hour when the flames seemed to catch at something inside me. Then the fire settled down to business, smoldering steadily, adding its own taint to the air. Crab apple leaves on boughs cut a day earlier shriveled like a time-lapse glimpse of late autumn. The fruit sizzled and dropped into the flames. A couple of hours later the pile was nothing more than a small mound of ash.
After twilight had come and gone and the temperature had dropped, I walked down again to where the bonfire had been. I turned the ashes with a manure fork. A night breeze blew across the coals and reddened them. They seemed to ripple in the darkness, their light refracted by their heat. For a moment I stood beside them, taking in their warmth. The unsteady lights in the ashes looked like the fires of some ancient city seen from high above, a place described by Goethe long ago, when he wrote, “The king is out hunting, the queen is expecting a child, and so things could not be better.”
At noon today, local apparent sidereal time will be approximately 1:29. The Julian Day will be 2450384, which is the number of days since high noon on the first of January 4713 B.C.E. That was the last time the twenty-eight-year solar and nineteen-year lunar cycles began on the same day as a fifteen-year Roman tax cycle, a coincidence first noticed in 1582 by the percipient Joseph Justus Scaliger, who invented the Julian calendar. Exactly 7,980 years will have passed before these cycles resume in unison and a new Julian Period begins, in the year 3267. (That will be some celebration.) If you probe a little deeper into the subject of time, you discover leap seconds and negative leap seconds and International Seconds. There’s a Modified Julian Date and a Truncated Julian Date. There are ideal clocks generating proper time. Greenwich Mean Time has a familiar, prime meridian ring to it, but alas it’s been replaced by Coordinated Universal Time, which sounds as though Earth presumed to control the clockwork in the distant cosmos.
But what do we call the hour we gained when we set our clocks back last night? It has no name. You make a pilgrimage to all the appliances—the alarm clocks, the wall clocks, the coffeemaker, the telephone, the VCR, the PC—and it seems for a moment as though time were a utility that got pumped into the house with the alternating current. Daylight Saving Time is the ultimate flat tax. Everybody pays up when it begins on the first Sunday in April, and on the last Sunday in October everybody reaps a one hundred percent refund of their hour, not a second of it lost to overhead. There are a few confusing exceptions. The Hopi Reservation doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time. The Navajo Nation, which surrounds the Hopi Reservation, does. The state of Arizona, which surrounds Nava-jos and Hopis alike, doesn’t. All three entities returned to synchronicity with the rest of the country, and their neighbors, last night. So did Indiana.
There’s a geographical equivalent to this temporal leap. Imagine driving north through the open prairie, along the edge of one township after another. (A township is a surveyed square six miles to a side.) The farther north you go, the more the lines of longitude converge, which means the township grid is steadily being compressed by the longitudinal grid. To adjust for this, the road north makes a lateral jog every twenty-four miles. We have just made the big jog east (the sun rises earlier now) on the northward road into winter. We keep going this direction for another fifty-five days until the road ends and the tundra begins. Out there the caribou and musk ox are grazing, a sign that it will be time to turn around and head back south toward summer.
When snow began falling on Sunday, I realized that a line from Keats—“until they think warm days will never cease”—had been running through my head for weeks. The line is from “To Autumn,” one of the loveliest poems in the language, and “they” are the bees, whose “clammy cells,” as Keats calls their comb, have been “o’erbrimm’d” by summer. Jonathan Bate, author of a book called The Song of the Earth, observes that the late summer of 1819, the season leading up to the completion of Keats’s ode on September 19, “was clear and sunny on thirty-eight out of the forty-seven days from 7 August to 22 September” and that temperatures were milder in the final week of that period than they had been in three years.
This wasn’t merely a spate of beautiful weather. It was weather of a kind, Bate notes, that would actually make breath come easier for a consumptive like Keats. There could be nothing more personal than the question of Keats’s lung capacity, and yet “To Autumn” doesn’t read as a personal poem. There’s something deceptively long-winded in the syntax of the first stanza, and some critics have seen a consumptive’s hectic flush in the stubble plains touched with “rosy hue.” But Bate reminds us, too, how broad the boundaries of “personal” experience really are. For Keats those boundaries include the season as a whole. The fine weather o’erbrimm’d him, and in doing so gave voice to itself.
Until the past few days, it was a Keatsian autumn, full of what the poet calls, in a letter from those same weeks, “chaste weather—Dian skies.” Never mind that the leaves are now almost gone, or that the skies are now unchaste, gray, and dousing us with snow showers. Somehow the brightness of the trees created the illusion that the periphery of my awareness had expanded. When Lindy and I walked the dogs, it felt as though we were all walking with eyebrows raised, though for the dogs that would be with nostrils distended.
Keats personified autumn, imagining her by a cider press or fast asleep in a “half-reap’d furrow.” Personifying the natural world is so fundamental and so limitless that it seems sometimes like the foundation of all poetry. To some, I suppose, personifying nature is an act of hubris, a refusal to accept the otherness of the world around us. But in a fall like this one—dry after a long wet, warm after unusual coolness—personifying nature seems like a means of meeting nature halfway. In the ghostliness of Keats’s autumn, “sitting careless on a granary floor,” what we really see is the way the season swells within us.
November
For some reason, every stage in this advancing season has brought with it a feeling of incredulity. A few weeks ago it seemed unbelievable that the leaves should be turning so soon and then that they should have dropped so promptly. Now, just this week, it seems incredible that snow should have fallen out of a goose-gray sky, skidding eastward toward the missing sun. I wake up thinking, “November already,” and realize that “already” is a word that’s been with me all autumn long, always measuring how far behind the season I feel.
The weather has been anything but harsh. Even the few frosts so far have been less than militant. But I seem to be holding back, feeling a reluctance about winter I’ve never felt before. Usually there’s something purely pragmatic about that feeling, a long list of jobs that still need doing, most of them the kind whose only satisfaction is knowing they’re done. Nearly everyone who lives in the country feels crowded for time right now. “Racing daylight” is the phrase I hear, and I hear it from men and women who’ve been racing daylight, working outdoors this time of year, their whole lives. There’s something different in the way they say it now. You hear hesitation from the most unhesitant people.
It takes no imagination to stay synchronized with the shifting of the season, with the retracting daylight or the sudden gathering of a wet morning wind that gets behind your ears and under your hair when you feed the animals. You don’t really even have to pay attention to keep up with the calendar. But you do have to be ready to part with the days that have already passed. September took far more than a month this year. It probably took two months, the one our bodies lived and the wholly different month we lived in our minds. Time fell out of gear for almost everyone.
Some of the reluctance that comes with this autumn is mere uncertainty, a sense that no one really knows the score. Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it’s nothing more than confidence in one’s own preparations. Somehow that’s not good enough this year. Like everyone, I find myself wanting the world to be right with itself again, even if only in the wrong old ways. In the heart of the reluctance I feel and
hear in the voices of my neighbors, there’s a longing for the inconsequential summer we were having not so many weeks ago. Longing is probably too strong a word. Better to say that the memory of what was, for many Americans, an uneventful August exerts a certain attraction right now. But the present is irrefutable. The leaves won’t rise again, except on a cold wind. Before long, I hope, that won’t seem so regrettable.
The last of the World War I veterans are almost impossibly old by now. They flicker past in the war footage shown repeatedly on late-night television, young men burdened by the weight of arms, with everything that implies. Now nearly all those men are dead, and the few still living seem to symbolize the enormous changes that have swept across the world in the years since the armistice was signed in 1918. In the presence of men and women of advanced age, it’s always tempting to behave like the host of the postmodern world, welcoming them to life as we know it, inviting them to marvel at the place we’ve all wound up, bristling as it does with the latest technology. The roles should be reversed. The old ones should be hosting us, inviting us to contemplate with them the intractable knowledge that comes from a place like the battlefields of World War I, where every faith—and especially the faith in moral and technical advancement—seemed to totter.
The armistice was signed in November, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. On its own, November can be bleak enough. The leaves are gone, and the trees seem frayed. A ridgeline of blackened, upthrust boughs seems to mirror the rain. The clouds have the texture of steel wool. Winter could come the next minute or the next month. But what November has ever been like November in the embattled salients of the Great War, where the earth itself was dismembered and interred, its flesh confused with the flesh of soldiers, horses, and mules? Even at peace, nature seems disordered, almost skeletal, in November. The consolation lies in the wood-smoke spiraling out of chimneys, the light in windows as the day goes down. It lies in the unbroken rhythm of living at peace, where the hour of armistice—the end of that painful caesura—is almost forgotten.
Lindy and I moved into this house on November 13, a day, that first year, with thirteen hours of freezing rain. In the years since, a part of me has been grafted onto this place, and I’m still waiting to learn whether it’s a vital part or not. I promised when we bought this house—Lindy recalls this clearly—to take things slowly, to bring about changes at a leisurely pace. I thought of that promise recently as I stood atop a stepladder in the kitchen, whacking the fireplace with a sledgehammer while Lindy tried to catch the dust before it landed. Our property abounds in firewood, and it had occurred to us that a freestanding wood-stove would be more practical than the largely useless fireplace taking up a corner of the kitchen. We opened a wall in a mildly interrogative manner. Once we did, we could see that the fireplace was just a sheet-metal firebox set behind a cheap façade of cement-board, mortar, and unattractive stone of a kind you might use to make mountains in a model railroad.
It all came down one Saturday morning, opening up what had been a narrow doorway between the kitchen and dining room and revealing a beautiful old beam. An old-house owner is a prospector, staking his claim on worn linoleum, tattered wallpaper, or painted wallboard. The hope is that beneath them lies an undefiled treasure of architectural detail or sumptuous wood, which a previous generation of owners—sick of looking at refined carpentry and the grain of chestnut or oak—covered with horrors all their own. The hope is often satisfied, but not often unambiguously. The beam we revealed is hand-hewn and completely sound except for the last foot on its eastern end. That will take some fudging. As we poke at this building, we discover in its bones the effects of lifelong bad posture, occasional inadequacies in the diet, and the signs of one or two serious accidents that would have killed a lesser domicile.
By now I find myself living in a house that barely resembles the one I thought we were buying. The house has changed us more than we’ve changed it. I almost never smack my head on the low ceiling over the stairs to the mudroom anymore. For me that passage has grown taller over the past year. Visitors smack their heads again and again, no matter how often I warn them, which confirms that the ceiling is just where it was when we moved in. And though Lindy and I have begun to wear a comforting groove into this place, much like the one the horses have worn through the barnyard, our daydreams grow more and more elaborate. Every day we’re surrounded by the adaptations other people have made to what was once, long ago, a simple rectangular structure, scarcely more than a wood-frame cabin on a hillside. Two centuries of change are telescoped into our day-to-day experience.
In nearly every way, it would be easier to alter a new house to our needs. But there’s something static about a new house, something terminal. This old house invites adaptation because it embodies a history of adaptation. A new house just stands there, settling, waiting for someone to come along and wonder what’s under those walls or why two bedrooms can’t be merged into one.
So this is where time has led us. The kitchen deck must go. It slopes toward the house and gets about ten minutes of sunlight on midwinter afternoons. In late November a glacier begins to build in that dark, antarctic corner, and it only ceases calving icebergs into the azalea bed about the end of April. To replace the deck—someday—we have in mind a stone terrace sheltered by a pergola, a pergola knotted with climbing hydrangea or a hops plant or, since we’re daydreaming, ceanothus. Lindy’s workroom—a small, crazed addition—must go as well. Its foundation is cracked, and its eaves actually cut across the lower corners of two windows upstairs.
Besides the days when we fret about our plans for this house, there are also days that approach perfection, when things seem fine just as they are. This was an autumn full of those days, the kind that lull you into believing that winter will never come, or that when it does come it will bring only snowfall or blue skies, not thirteen hours of freezing rain. The sugar maples turned, and the goldenrod blazed all around us. I poked around at the base of a compost heap I started in April and found that time had turned a pile of horse manure, waste straw, weeds, and grass clippings into friable compost. I took a cart of it up to the asparagus bed and mulched it heavily. I buried the feet of all the roses in fresh manure and cut down the peonies. Then I walked to the high end of the pasture, above the maples, and looked back at the house, itself almost the color of goldenrod. I imagined that I could see smoke from the new woodstove, which still lay crated in the barn, drifting out of the chimney and beyond it the first flakes of snow against the distant hills.
Aldo Leopold’s ecological testament, A Sand County Almanac, was a posthumous book, appearing a year and a half after Leopold died of a heart attack in April 1948 at the age of sixty-one. A graduate of the Yale Forestry School and a seventeen-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold had his greatest influence, during his lifetime, as a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin. But it’s the Almanac, his meditations on a Wisconsin River farm and an unequivocal statement of conscience, that will carry his influence and his good name down the generations.
Leopold’s extraordinary contribution to our world was to articulate the idea of a land ethic. The human relation to land, he wrote, “is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” Leopold believed that the basis of successful conservation was to extend to nature the ethical sense of responsibility that humans extend to each other. This idea has acquired tremendous force since A Sand County Almanac first appeared. The fact that the idea now seems unexceptionable is a measure of its widespread influence.
Fifty years is both a very short and a very long time in the life of a good idea. The power of Leopold’s argument—buttressed as it is by his clear, vigorous prose—has not been blunted in the least. In fact his argument seems more urgently true now than ever. In the past fifty years Leopold’s work has helped drive the environmental movement. Yet the tendencies he lamented, summed up in the phrase “despoliation of land,” have accelerated almost out of
control.
Leopold will last not because he captured a moment or a feeling, though he does both in the first sections of A Sand County Almanac. He will last because we have scarcely begun to work out the implications of his ideas. He suggested an “ecological interpretation of history,” which has only recently begun to be written. He recognized that the “ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down… to a question of intellectual humility.” He described a dynamic that still threatens wildness. “The very scarcity of wild places, reacting with the mores of advertising and promotion,” he wrote, “tends to defeat any deliberate effort to prevent their growing still more scarce.”
These are formidable ideas. But none are more challenging than Leopold’s land ethic. It requires a rerooting in nature, a forsaking of the hope that we can save wild or even open land on the basis of its economic value. We are busy, Leopold says, “inventing subterfuges to give [nature] economic importance.” They won’t work. There’s a risk involved in creating a truly ethical relation to the land. But Leopold believed in risk. “Too much safety,” he wrote, “seems to yield only danger in the long run.”
I suppose that if I were a woolly bear caterpillar or a squirrel storing hickory nuts or one of the other creatures said to know in advance the severity of the winter ahead, I would be able to do just the right amount of work to get ready for it. Instead I have to prepare for winter in the subjunctive, as if it were going to be severe—as if I were a doomsaying squirrel. Like most people, I’m not a very good student of my own behavior, but I’ve noticed in myself an urge these days to get ready for winter. I noticed it because it led me down to the barn one morning and kept me hard at work for several days, stacking hay in the loft, preparing to heat the horses’ water tank, making a place in the barn aisle where the horseshoer could work under lights and out of the wind.
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