Last week a tree farmer told me there was only an inch of frost in the ground, which was true when he said it. Now there’s more, and I’ve set aside plans to dig a hole for the blue spruce I was buying. But I was struck by the common expression—frost in the ground. It sounds so porous somehow, a web of crystals latticing their way down through the snow and the sod, in among the Japanese beetle grubs lying in wait for next summer. After bitter nights and a steady hard wind these past few days, the panes in the windows have been covered with frost. When the sun strikes those windows, the frost melts instantly and the meltwater evaporates almost as quickly, leaving behind dust prints where there had been drops. It all seems so fragile, so nineteenth century.
But there’s nothing porous or fragile or antiquated about frost in the ground. It’s the brutalism of winter, a stern, domineering, eyeless fact. The blowing snow seems harsh, as unforgiving and protean as the wind that drives it. Every morning there are new contours of overnight drifting, cornices arcing outward from stone outcrops, hollows at the base of trees, unexpected depths on the smooth downslope of a hillside. Even the sound of the snow underfoot changes from hour to hour. But in the barnyard, a week of horse traffic has barely knocked the peaks off the mud ridges that formed when the last hard freeze came. People often compare frost in the ground to iron or steel, but those tend to be people who have never tried to dig a grave for a dog with a six-foot pry bar in mid-January, as I once did at the pleading of a mournful friend. Frost feels harder than iron or steel. Not even death is as hard as frost in the ground.
When the frost retreats come spring, in a warm rain or under a hot sun, it will retreat with a load of subterranean stone in its grasp, creating a thin, horizontal moraine across the pasture, and yet it will leave the beetle grubs where they lie. But there’s almost nothing you can’t make use of if you put your mind to it, and that includes frost. In late February or early March, when the snow has melted but the ground is still frozen, I’m going to scatter a mix of red clover and bird’s-foot trefoil seed over the pasture. This is called frost seeding.
It sounds like a way to sow ice crystals, or a version of the biblical proverb about seed falling on stony ground. But as the frost relents, the ground expands and contracts and expands again, and the seeds will work their way down into the soil, where they germinate. It’s an old idea, as old as the weeds along the tree line. Even now the snow is flecked with hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of weed seeds, all waiting for that slow melting ride down to the ground.
The horses have strewn a green carpet of hay underfoot, and two crows feed at its edge. The snow has buried nearly everything in that pasture, but what it hasn’t buried it has thrown into silhouette. The tops of the tallest grasses and weeds protrude from the whiteness. On sharp days when there has been light wind and a new inch or two, the weed stems cut a V in the snow. When the wind has been especially strong, the weed tops—their inflorescences—leave a distinctive print, a brushmark, on the surface.
An abandoned clearing that was full of color in August or June now displays the remnants of only a few plants, stiff, skeletal forms still bearing seed against the spring. The blankness of the background confers a kind of unaccustomed grandeur on some of the plants that still stand upright. Burdocks—most grasping, most contemptible of weeds—spread like ancient oaks. Galls appear like minarets high on a clump of weed stalks. Goldenrods bend as though they were seaweed swayed by a light current. The ingenuity, the evolutionary virtuosity, of botanical design becomes apparent among the motherwort, a plant with carillon after carillon of empty, spiny bells surrounding its four-sided stalk.
In late December I feel an almost painful hunger for light. The open woods, bereft of leaves, and the snow itself feel like a kind of appeasement, a way of making amends to my eye for the almost grudging tread of the sun across the sky. That hunger is what makes the detail of the natural world so precious now. Pale green lichen on a tree trunk has all the power of a daylily in bloom. Where moss insulates a south-facing rock outcrop, a few ferns remain May green. The color, like the very plushness of the moss, seems almost inconceivable.
It’s tempting to think of winter as the negation of life, but life has too many sequences, too many rhythms, to be altogether quieted by snow and cold. Why are there still leaves on the maple boughs that snapped off in a big storm this autumn? How does it happen that midges hatch on a day just slightly warmer than the rest of the week? They rise from the brook and follow its course upstream, into the darkness of a hemlock wood.
At our place the horses don’t eat from mangers. They gather at feeding time in a corner of the pasture near the water tank and the run-in shed, and they take their grain from heavy rubber pans set on the ground. When the horses finish their oats, they toss the hay out of the feeder and paw the flakes apart, as if they were searching for something in the smell of dried grass. Sometimes at this time of year it’s hard to tell in the rain and fog where the darkness of day ends and the darkness of night begins. Mud clings to hooves and boots, and it dries on the horses’ flanks. Now at last the mud has frozen, making the footing better for everyone. It’s been possible once again to see stars at night and to watch, at feeding time, the sky dying out in the pale rose of winter.
The manger in which—the story reads—that infant lay so long ago, whose manger was it? Its wood was smoothed, as if in preparation, by the tongues of animals. In a manger where oats or corn are fed, the softer wood erodes in time and the wood grain appears to rise, glistening when a cow has just done eating and the planks are still wet. In a manger full of hay, a horse will often begin to feed at the very center, shaping a hollow, a nest, of grass or alfalfa. But in paintings of the Nativity, the manger has always been consecrated to another need, and the animals have been displaced, uncomplaining, from their meal. By the time the Wise Men come from Herod—so again say all the paintings—the manger has reverted to its proper use. The beasts are nose-deep in their fodder, but they look up, enfolding Magi, mother, and infant in a world where chores are meant to be done, the animals fed, at the same time every day no matter who comes to visit.
There were eyes that would have been hard to gaze upon that Christmas Eve and Christmas morning many years ago. Fear is what the shepherds felt when the good news was announced. But in the eyes of their flock and in the eyes of the ox and ass depicted in every Nativity, there’s the implacable mildness seen even now among the horses when the sun finally warms them. They lie down in the pasture, in the snow, their legs folded beneath them, and steam begins to rise from their sorrel and bay and rose-gray backs. Their repose is a sign of confidence, of safety, and it washes over the person who gets to bring them their hay, which they accept, every morning, as if every morning were Christmas.
The next-to-last leg of a long day was the flight from Denver into Casper, Wyoming, and touchdown just at sunset. That flight restored everything to scale—a slow turboprop plane, more than half empty, the Casper airport, nearly deserted except for a man and woman in National Guard uniforms with black rifles slung barrel down across their backs. I sat behind the wing, looking out at the rivets on the trailing edge. The snow-matted thatch of Colorado hovered below, the corridor of tilled and irrigated ground running north from Denver to Fort Collins and breaking suddenly in the country near the Wyoming line, where an ocean of short grass spread without interruption to the dark eastern horizon.
I’d spent all day in crowds, at check-in counters, in security lines, in the thigh and elbow crush of viewless airliners. And now, here at last, coming into Wyoming, was the pure impassioned abstraction of flying once again, the ground subsiding at takeoff, the occasional sideways skid of the plane on the currents of air, the shuddering and ticking as crosswinds caught us on the final approach. It felt like a right recovered, a perspective too vital to be curtailed. Long wind-shadows, cast by haystacks and windbreaks, stretched eastward across the snowy plains. The eastern furrows still held snow in the great center-pivot circles of irrigated
ground, though the western furrows had blown dry. The sinuous trackings of runoff creeks looked like the insect runes you sometimes see carved just beneath the bark on a round of firewood. The ranch buildings below had herded together out of the cold wind, into the pale reach of a yardlight.
The last leg was by car in darkness down the long stretch of blacktop that passes westward through Powder River, Moneta, Shoshoni, and on into Riverton. Snow had piled up along the edges of a railroad shed and in eroded hollows out of the wind, but elsewhere the snow shone mostly like a version of the moon’s thin light. A coyote stood beside the highway, his coat brush-thick, looking like a crossing guard with miles and miles of crossings to watch over. The Powder River sign, population 50, seemed to be exaggerating. Eastbound trucks slung past in the opposite lane, traveling within a self-propelled storm of grit. Cattle had begun to bed down along the fence lines where hay had been fed.
A winter night can seem almost infinite here under the smooth, cold sky. The last of the day’s heat in the blacktop and the bare fortifications of rock has long since drifted away. Even the smallest undulations in the open ground, the tightest switches of grass, look like welcome cover from a wind that, in imagination at least, is always blowing. When you near a town like Lander, the sense of relief comes not so much from the streetlights, which are hidden until the very last, but from the depth of the hills, from the willows that encroach on the rivers and creeks, from a gray coppiced look that promises shelter. The cottonwoods in town have that look too, a witch’s head of bare, tangled branches against the night. The streets lie still and broad, the houses lit within themselves, the darkness deep and even.
I wake up sometimes at night, two or three o’clock, and walk to a window that looks out over the pasture. Some nights the moon is high in its December arc, so different from the angle it cuts through the sky in summer. Its light falls like a pale shadow among the white birches on the hillside. But on nights when the sky is hidden by clouds, when I can almost feel my pupils dilating in the search for a reference point outdoors, I turn to a flat panel of light that shines out along the fence line. It comes from a bulb in the chicken house that clicks on automatically at one-thirty in the morning. Dawn comes abruptly to the chickens. I imagine them blinking at reveille on their roosts.
The light is a trick, a way of fooling the hens into thinking that summer lingers on and that laying time is still here. Our hens are young. Until December 22 they had never laid an egg. But on the day after the winter solstice, in time with the returning sun, we found a brown pullet egg, still warm, in the hay below the nest boxes. It was an occasion of great mutual satisfaction. The roosters, still far too numerous and a pox on each other’s contentment, didn’t notice the event at all. Until you’ve watched roosters chase each other round and round, propelled by their hormones, you have no idea how much they can move like Groucho Marx. They’re that sardonic too.
Only a few weeks ago the roosters were young enough to be called cockerels, their voices still breaking. One by one they tried to crow as they lounged around the chicken yard, but the crowing always sounded as though Reynard the Fox had a paw on their throats, or as though they were using a straight mute in their trumpets. Now they sing out loud and clear, in different pitches, with widely differing takes on the canonical cock-a-doodle-doo. Why there should be so much pleasure in listening to the crowing of a rooster who really knows his business I don’t understand. I sometimes imagine the sound the sun would make if we could hear it coming up. I think of that sound as a great processional march—the musical movement of Sol’s robes over the eastern sky—but not so grand that there wasn’t a note of hilarity in it. The hilarity is provided by a crowing rooster.
Watching these chickens grow, building a house for them, getting to understand how they regard the world, I’ve been surprised again and again by how much of what I know about chickens comes from the cartoons I watched as a kid. Not that I expected the senatorial presence of Foghorn Leghorn in our Buff Orpington roosters or the opulent, Odalisque-like preening of cartoon hens. But I recognize the incessant barnyard drama from the cartoons, and when my dad and I built the chicken house in October I couldn’t resist adding a slatted ramp of the kind that every cartoon chicken house always had. Now when I get up in the middle of the night and see the chicken light burning, throwing a yellow glow out into the darkness, I find myself comforted and go back to bed and to sleep.
To the Reader
The notes and observations in The Rural Life were written over several years, but they’ve been gathered together in these pages into a single calendar year. If spring seems to be well advanced on one page but balky and weeks behind on the next, you can blame it on the weather or on the fact that I’m probably describing two very different springs. I hope the occasional sudden shifts in the seasons of this book are no more erratic than what the weather actually brings us these days.
Most of these brief essays were published in a different form on the editorial page of the New York Times, under the rubric “The Rural Life.” Others appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, This Old House, and Double Take. I’m indebted to Howell Raines, Gail Collins, and my colleagues on the Times editorial board. For their considerable editorial contributions along the way, I’d also like to thank Bob Gottlieb, Chip McGrath, Ilena Silverman, Dave Grogan, Steve Petranek, and Albert LaFarge. I owe special thanks, as always, to my agent, Flip Brophy.
The Rural Life could not have been written without the daily help and inspiration of my wife and partner in rural living, Lindy Smith. She knows better than anyone how much this book belongs to her.
About the Author
VERLYN KLINKENBORG was born in Colorado and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time, and his work has also appeared in many magazines. Since 1997 he has been a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. He lives in rural New York state with his wife, the photographer Lindy Smith.
A Note on the Type
This book was set in a digitized version of Baskerville, based on the typeface designed by typefounder and printer John Baskerville in 1752. By the mid-eighteenth century, printing, paper, and typography standards had reached an all-time low. Baskerville dramatically upgraded the craft of all three, producing beautiful volumes, including John Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1758, and Baskerville’s much-acclaimed masterpiece, the Cambridge University Bible, in 1763. Baskerville typefaces are still much admired for their beautiful proportions and extreme legibility, making them well suited for both book design and advertising.
“Klinkenborg can turn baling twine into poetry.”
—Tommy Hays, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With an eloquence unmatched by any other living writer. Verlyn Klinkenborg observes the juncture at which our lives and the natural world intersect. His yearlong meditation on the rigors and wonders of country life—encompassing memories of his family’s Iowa homestead, time spent in the wide-open spaces of the American West, and his experiences on the small farm in upstate New York where he lives with his wife—abounds with vicarious pleasures for the reader as it indelibly records and celebrates the everyday beauty of the world we inhabit.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Book Sense 76 Pick
“The Rural Life is arresting, even profound, forcing us to look at the world
in a new way.” —Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune
“In a voice reminiscent of E. B. White, Klinkenborg paints a picture of a fading world in colors that are solid and authentic. His joy is evident throughout.”
—Patricia Weitz, Los Angeles Times
“A revitalizing book.… Klinkenborg has developed an eye for luminous detail and
has found a language that revitalizes both our memories and our experience of the
rural.… Finding the right words is Klinkenborg’s means of drawing himself
—Jim Heynen, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time. He is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, National Geographic, Mother Jones, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications.
The Rural Life Page 16