More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  But even a little time in one place adds up. The chores never go quite the same one day to the next, because the wind is up or a truck backfires on the highway just as the horses were about to settle down. The seasons never proceed along quite the same path. Even something as categorical as the first frost comes in the most uncategorical ways. Some years it drops like death on the garden, blackening everything in sight. This year the frost waited and waited and then took only the morning-glory blossoms along the road before returning a week later and taking everything else. We live up here within the circumference of change, and every year the circle gets a little bigger.

  Some things almost never change, of course. At dusk the chickens take to their roosts, my wife says, like ninth-grade girls at the high-school basketball game. We moved the pigs to fresh pasture last weekend, where they’re hip-deep in still-green grass, but they still come loping over to visit when we walk out their way to check on their feed and water. And no matter how the day has gone, night never really begins until I walk up from the barn for the last time.

  November 23

  A couple of weeks ago I found a small settlement of lice on one of the pigs. I got out a stiff horse brush and gave that pig and her companion a serious brushing, which is one of the great joys in a pig’s life. Then I raked out all the old hay in the pig house, closed the two pigs inside with a fresh hay-bale to tear apart, and hauled the house off to a different part of the pasture. I brush them every time I feed them now, and I haven’t seen any lice since. I brush, and the pigs flop over on their sides and lie there, barely breathing, eyes closed, legs quivering with pleasure. I try to remember to watch just how much affection I let myself feel for them.

  Affection is what we’re really farming up here, farming it mostly in ourselves. Snow fell late the other afternoon, and as it thickened all around me, I realized that there’s nothing more definite, more substantial in the world than the topline of a red pig against the snow. That’s the kind of thought I carry around for days on end, until it explains something I didn’t know I was trying to explain. I can always see the self-interest in the animals, and perhaps they see it in me, too. But there’s always something else as well. The horses drift their flanks in my direction when they muzzle up to their hay. Is it just a scratch they want or do they have something to tell me? The chickens crowd up against the chicken-yard fence as I approach with the feed bucket, and I have to admit that this is small-town self-interest at its purest, the look of the line in front of the payroll office. Most of the birds flutter away from me as I toss out the cracked corn, and then they fall on it greedily.

  But there’s always one, a Speckled Sussex hen, that will let me pick her up and hold her under my arm. Why she lets me do that I have no idea. Why I like to is easy: the inscrutable yellow eye, the white-dotted feathers, the tortoise-shell beak, and, above all, the noises she makes. “No inhabitants of a yard,” Gilbert White once wrote, “seem possessed of such a variety of expression and so copious a language as common poultry.” I don’t know what the Sussex is saying—perhaps only “put me down”—but it sounds like broken purring. She was a day-old chick on Memorial Day and now, like the rest of the flock, she’s beginning to lay in the dark of winter.

  A clean barnyard is its own reward, and the way the pigs exult at feeding time is itself a source of exultation. But there’s still no chore as pleasing as gathering eggs. Most of the serious chicken books have charts that measure cost-effectiveness in the poultry yard, the ratios of feed to eggs to dollars and cents. None of the books say anything about gratification, even though a newly laid egg looks exactly like something for nothing.

  Year

  TWO

  February 8

  For the past few weeks, I’ve been wondering, just how sharp can an icicle get? In early afternoon the icicles outside my office window lengthen themselves drip by drip, and I conclude that an icicle can only be as sharp as a drop of water. But in the morning, when the rising sun turns that curtain of ice lavender, the icicles look as sharp as needles. They’re ridged along their stems like the spine of some ancient reptile, and yet they quiver in the wind. On the west side of the house, they reach from the ice dam in the eaves all the way down to the frozen deck. Icicle is too delicate a word for those constructions. They’re the stalactites of a deep, hard winter in a cave of cold.

  One morning last week, the temperature was twelve below zero at six a.m. A few days later the temperature at the same time was twelve above. To a thermometer, the difference between those two readings is twenty-four degrees. “An old-fashioned winter,” you hear people saying, as though the snow were falling or the mercury dropping to the sound of sleigh bells. On a bright blowing day, the air fills almost invisibly with particles of snow that catch the sunlight. They look like the stars you see in your eyes when you stand up too quickly. At night the moon coasts through the sky like the source of cold, shedding its beams on a frozen world that the sun is powerless to warm when it finally rises.

  All around us on this small farm we have the makings of a glacier. Every step we take compresses the snow a little more, and the pressure slowly turns new-fallen powder into ice, just the way it does in a real glacier. If spring comes, the last thing to melt will be the ski tracks along the fence line. When I walk across the pasture with Badger, a big, loping mix of Airedale and Australian shepherd, I can feel the history of this winter underfoot. Sometimes the snow crust from the Christmas storm bears me up so that I’m walking only calf-deep through the January snow, and sometimes I break all the way through to November. Badger skims across the snow, plowing it with his nose, until suddenly he holds a paw up, whimpering in the cold. Then we run for the house. In the chicken yard, the hens and roosters stand on one leg, then another as though they were marching in extreme slow motion down the alley between snowbanks.

  On a twelve below morning, the ones really having an old-fashioned winter are the animals. Snow falls on the horses and never melts, because their hair is so thick. I imagine they look stoic, but I know that the idea of stoicism is all mine. Compared to a summer full of flies, a cold hard winter with plenty of hay and fresh water is nothing to complain about. The pigs spend most of the day bundled in their house. They look naked, but they’re like land-going whales, serene in a coat of blubber that keeps them warm through the worst of it. The animals see me come out of the house hooded, gaitered, mittened, and balaclaved and wonder what poor creature is this.

  March 8

  At last the starch has gone out of the snow. The hillsides and pastures have begun to slump. After a day of warm rain, a circular hollow forms at the base of every tree, and when the clouds drift apart, the afternoon heat the trunks absorb enlarges those hollows. Last week, a bare patch of ground opened up on a south-facing hill and along the south-facing ditches. The call of birds at the feeders began to change almost a month ago. You could tell that something had been added to the perfunctory songs of winter, even if you couldn’t say just what it was. I never think which way the shadows fall as the sun moves across the morning sky, and yet I can’t help noticing that the angles have changed. The shadows on the snow seem bolder, more definitive than they did a few weeks ago.

  All of this is encouraging, and yet the garden catalogs lie in an undisturbed heap. The top layer of soil is still a good foot and a half beneath the snow, and the gardening zeal I should be feeling lies buried well below that, down where the beetle grubs doze. Every time I get ready to start making seed lists I should have made a month ago, we get another six inches of light powder, which hurls me backward in time. The thaw is as fickle as the blonde coyote my wife saw in the pasture the other day. It stood there boldly for a while, driving the dogs crazy, and then it vanished into the woods, leaving only its canine musk behind. Spring is going to have to come this year not with hints and prognostications but with a solid blow to the head, a slap across the face, a sharp poke in the ribs. Otherwise I won’t believe it.
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  The surest sign of the changing season up here is the blacktop roads. In mid-January the highways seemed to be full of mild corrugations, ripples rather than bumps. The ripples sharpened into ridges over February, and as rain began to fall and freeze in the night, the frost began to shear off whole layers of asphalt. Just up the main road from our house, an axle-deep, car-length pit has opened. The road crews marked it with flashers, but only the locals know how spine pounding it really is, and by March we know every heave in our stretch of road. We weave up and down the highway, trying to keep out of the alignment shops, trying to avoid the bone-rattling shocks that nearly jump you into the other lane.

  I keep a long list of things that need doing this spring mainly because keeping a list itself is an accomplishment. It’s been too cold to build pasture pens for the chickens or a house for the ducks and geese that are coming in May. It’s too cold to begin building a farrowing pen for the sows we have coming later this year and too early to start seeding the pastures. So I’m trying to figure out how to treasure these days of utter suspense, before the winter goes. There’s never any telling what spring will bring.

  March 18

  I’d like to be able to hear the snow melting. A low whoosh would do, a sigh from the snowpack as it yields to the sun’s insistence. I’d settle for a barely audible scream. The sound the snowmelt actually makes—the aural glittering of a dozen rills—is too diverting to suit my darker emotional needs. We had more than a hundred inches of snow this winter. It’s not enough that it should melt. It should suffer as it melts. For the past five months I’ve walked back and forth to the barn over a sheet of polar ice. Now it groans as I step along it. I enjoy the sound. I send the horses up and down the ice sheet, then I follow in the tractor. I’m breaking up winter while I have the chance.

  Reports say that robins are near and that red-winged blackbirds have arrived only a few miles south of us. The snowdrops and aconites lurk somewhere under the sagging drifts. Last Sunday—the first really warm day in months—the rain gauge in one of the garden beds suddenly reappeared, as if reporting for work. Plowed snow still stands in peaks all around us, looking more geographical than ever now, an Earth in miniature. Since the big melt began last weekend, those alps have broken apart into separate island continents, divided by a rising sea of gravel and matted sod. The runoff cuts deltas into the rotting ice. Whole Ganges flood the low spots.

  I admire the animals we live with, their keenness, their toughness, the completeness of their sense of self. But what I really admire right now is their ability to shed. I stood in the barnyard the other evening with Nell, the mustang. She eats half what the other horses do and hairs up twice as thick. She’s been rolling fretfully in the snow for the past couple of weeks. When I scratched her back I came away with whole fistfuls of red horsehair. By the time I finished scratching, the ground around her looked like the floor under a draft-induction barber’s chair. She squared her legs so I could lean into the work.

  This time of year makes me wish I could slough my skin entire, like a snake, just walk away from that old integument and step out new into the air. Humans thrive on metaphors of rebirth and regeneration, but it’s the actuality of spring that overwhelms us. Every hour peels back another layer of snow and shrinks the dominion of ice. The ground gives and the sap streams upward. The finches molt into their mating colors. I walk out among it all hoping to change with the season, too.

  March 24

  A couple of weeks ago, I was in the agricultural midland of the San Joaquin Valley, where geometry rules. Almonds, grapes, English walnuts, and apples stood in careful ranks beneath the warm sun, the apples blooming, bees working the blossoms in every grove. Then I came home. The passengers on the plane let out a collective groan when we dropped below the clouds over Albany and saw a layer of ice over everything below us. The ice was just a fleeting reminiscence of winter, melted the next day. Winter’s real reminder was the look of the land itself. The earth had been flattened by the cold compress of all that snow. The grass was leveled. Where leaves had blown up against the stone walls last October, there was now an indiscriminate mat of partial decomposition. Any natural order in the landscape had been eradicated.

  You know what happens next. Spring comes at last. It makes a terrible story, because we’ve heard it so often, and yet it’s the best story any of us know, always worth repeating. Last Sunday, the pasture in front of the house greened up. The pasture grasses reasserted their ascendancy. They climbed out of the dead thatch, through the overlay of dead leaves, and took on the color of hope itself. The earth seemed to blush green. You could practically smell the photosynthesis. All the markers of spring had come and gone—the snowdrops, the aconites, the sap lines where the neighbors collect sugar-maple sap.

  After checking the fences, I turned the horses into the pasture. They trotted through the gate with the high-headed carriage they use when advancing into new ground, breasting the world around them. Then they ran, leaping and farting and kicking. They circled back around and lowered themselves into a flying hand gallop, almost squatting as they stretched out to speed, clods flying from their hooves. Then they stopped and bounced straight upward, all four feet in the air, the way a fox does when it pounces on a vole. They half-reared and feinted, pirouetted and bucked, rolled once or twice. And suddenly it was over. Remedy stood at the southwest fence line and sighed at the neighbor’s horses across the road. Nell and Ida began to graze on the new grass. In a moment they lay flat out on their sides, basking in the sun, stone dead to all appearances.

  I stood at the fence, watching the horses turn into their emotions. As much as I admire the rationality of horses—the quality that allows us to ride them—I admire just as much the way they come unhinged with something that humans would have to call joy. There are days when it feels as though we carry our bodies around with us, separate, confusing, demanding, the distant province of our being. But spring brings days when we can almost emulate the horses, when the body acts on its own thought, which it receives directly from the sun bearing down, the grass bearing up, the whole surface of place itself coming to life again.

  May 18

  “Living as we do, in the eternal NOW! it is but faintly that we can mirror on the mind, the existence of this country, as it was but a little while past.” So writes a regular correspondent in the September 1, 1853, issue of The Country Gentleman: A Journal for the Farm, the Garden, and the Fireside, published by Luther Tucker in Albany, New York. Recently, a reader sent me an old bound volume of The Country Gentleman, which was published every Thursday and read far and wide. Since then, I’ve been putting off the eternal NOW! as best I can and contemplating the existence of this country as it was but a little while past.

  It was a time, 150 years ago, when there were weekly cattle and grain markets in Albany, when Cooperstown reported regularly on its hops production, and when the Democratic Party in New York—the Hunkers and Barnburners—were divided into Hard Shell and Soft Shell tickets. Long forgotten breeds of animals filled barnyards and pastures. In those days a hungry person, coming in the right season upon a barn floor covered with apples, could choose from Pearmains, Pippins, Greenings, Lady Apples, Spitzenburgs, Maiden’s-blushes, Baldwins, Tewksburys, Russets, and the wonderfully named Seek-no-furthers. At the state fair in Saratoga Springs, one exhibitor displayed 175 varieties of pears.

  The America glimpsed through these pages was a rural laboratory, a place where farmers and gardeners experimented constantly. Butter, it’s reported, tastes best when churned at fifty-two degrees. One reader describes the best way to strip osiers or basket willows. Another corrects the notion that “Minnesota is too cold for profitable farming.” Yet another defends “scientific farming,” which, he argues, is nothing more than “patience, perseverance, energy of character, and a determination on the part of the farmer that he will make his farming a ‘living witness’ to all reasonable men, that his theory and practice is a r
eality, and not a ‘humbug.’ ”

  But The Country Gentleman wasn’t just farming news. It was a digest of events from around the world, with special attention to English farmyards, railroad accidents, and the news from California, which still lay a little more than three weeks away by the fastest ship. The paper reported the fact that “the celebrated Kit Carson has arrived in California from across the plains, with some nine thousand head of sheep.” It excerpted uplifting speeches and always included a reflective essay called “The Fireside.” It featured a literary column, which noted in one week the appearance of the sixth volume of Coleridge’s works, the newest number of Bleak House, and a groundbreaking book called The Hive and the Honey Bee by Rev. L. L. Langstroth.

  I can’t help imagining the day each week when The Country Gentleman arrived by mail. (In 1853, when it began, the paper cost $2 a year.) Mr. B. V. French in Braintree, Massachusetts, would check to make sure his ad for Devon cows had been properly printed. Another reader would notice the strange statistic—ironic, of course—that “there are eight hundred ways of earning a living in New-York. The number of expedients for getting your living earned for you by others, has not been mentioned in any census.” And I, a reader coming a century and a half later, am struck above all by a set of figures derived from the census. “The village, town, and city population of the United States, is 4,000,000. The rural population reaches 19,263,000.” That, as much as anything, defines the difference between now and then.

  June 18

  When I first moved to the country, a realtor showed me a grand old farmhouse with an attached barn. The realtor was dreaming to think that I could afford it. But the memory of that place has stuck with me, especially the thought of walking through what looked like a closet door off the kitchen and being swallowed by the cavernous maw of a beautiful, well-worn dairy barn. If you owned the place, I suppose the surprise of it would wear off one day. But to me it felt like walking out the kitchen door and directly into the tree-tops. Like most New Yorkers, my first thought, then, was “convertible space.” The reason I still think about that place is for the pleasure of having the animals so close, so collectively, so cooperatively housed.