More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  There’s a house and barn where I live now, attached by a road. And what I’ve discovered over the years is that unless you also have a machine shed, you don’t actually have a barn. Even more than animals, machines require shelter. The local farmers I admire pride themselves on never letting their equipment spend a night outside. That means machine sheds with sliding doors. There’s no such thing as a free-range tractor, at least not in the northeast, whereas most of the animals we raise do best when free-ranging. But they all require some housing, even the ducks and geese.

  As time passes here, we’re accumulating a lot of small animal shelters, most of which I’ve built myself. It begins to look like musical chairs. Until the new pigs come next month, the ducks and geese, only a few weeks old, are borrowing the pig house. The old and new chicken houses are vacant now so the winter chicken yard can get some rest. The birds are out on pasture, which they share with the horses.

  The first thing I built when we got chickens was a chicken tractor—a small cage designed to be moved daily to fresh grass. I read the books and built what I saw there. It was way too heavy and not very chicken-like. I took it apart the other day and rebuilt it according to my knowledge of chickens, not books. It comes as a surprise to realize that I can now predict what chickens want in the way of housing, but it’s true, as far as it goes. I show them just what’s in their price range, nothing more. How far down this road I’ve gone became plain when I realized, with satisfaction, that I’d built the new chicken tractor entirely out of scrap. The chickens seem proud of it, too.

  Domestic animals are the ones we build houses for. Wild animals make their own arrangements, consulting only their own needs. The point was brought home to me a couple of days ago. I’d been waking up in the middle of the night, wondering just how to refashion that chicken tractor. I’d worked up a dozen different versions in my head. One morning last week, my wife and I walked around the garden, just to see what had grown in the night. We stopped to admire a Korean fir she got me for my birthday last year. Whenever I stand next to it, I feel like Paul Bunyan, as tall as the trees I survey. Together Lindy and I looked down into the boughs and there, in a fork near the trunk, was a bird’s nest with four tiny azure eggs inside, a demitasse of horsehair, grass, and lichen, perfectly wrought and all from scrap.

  July 27

  I don’t think of wasps as particularly domestic creatures. They cause in me, and in most people, a swift revulsion—not only a fear of getting stung but of getting stung by an insect that looks so alien. But while I was fixing up the pig house the other afternoon—the new pigs were waiting in the back of the pickup—I saw a pair of paper wasps delicately dabbing at the edges of a small nest hanging from a single stem under the pig-house eave. Something about their movements, embroidering their way around the circumference of cells, struck me as downright broody, which is a word that has recently come into common use up here. The wasps and I were at work on the same task, fixing up the place, and I’ve concluded that they’re not as alien as humans think. According to one researcher, paper wasps recognize each other not only through the chemical scent on their exoskeletons but through visual identification of facial patterns.

  Nature seems to offer the same two lessons to humans over and over again. The first one is this: no matter what form life takes, no matter how alien a creature appears at first, it turns out in the end to be close genetic kin, with similar concerns as ours. The other lesson is best summed up by the animal behaviorist, Elizabeth Tibbetts, who studied the recognition behavior of paper wasps. “They are more sophisticated than we thought,” she concluded. That’s always the conclusion. Some people seem to think that more sophisticated wasps must mean less sophisticated humans, as if behavioral sophistication were a zero-sum game. In fact, there’s plenty to go around. Someday, as a measure of our own sophistication, we’ll come to the blanket conclusion that all creatures are more sophisticated than we thought.

  The stripes on the paper wasps are the color of midsummer, a shade that in some lights is golden, in others almost orange, like mullein and asters and black-eyed Susans. Mid-July comes and the palette of blossoms shifts to hotter colors, as if in their vividness they were reflecting the sun. My own wishfulness makes these weeks seem a perpetual season, a part of the year when time almost pretends to stop. Out by the mailbox, the Queen Anne’s lace has come into bloom, flat white discs of galaxies spinning far out in space. It seems as if those blossoms have always been there, but that’s the memories of other summers filling in for the shortness of this one.

  What makes this summer different around here, besides the fact that this year’s pigs are real talkers, is the presence of a broody hen. The natural eagerness to sit on eggs has been bred out of most chickens, but we have one hen from an old breed—a Dorking—who will sit on anything even vaguely egg-shaped. Three weeks ago we set her on a clutch of eggs from another old breed—an odd number for good luck. She has barely moved since then, except to reverse direction in her nest box and shift the eggs beneath her. Her comb has gone pale, and she’s looking a little bloodshot around her beautiful amber eyes. When I stop by to check on her—waiting for that twenty-first day—she looks out at me with surprising certainty. To me it looks as though she knows she’s in the home stretch.

  August 7

  Look deep enough into the history of almost any Iowa town and you come to the primordial nineteenth-century tale of breaking the prairie, as if it were a herd of wild horses. Breaking the prairie took special plows and large teams of draft animals. The first step was skinning the earth, turning over the sod, exposing the fertile soils that lay beneath it. But what really broke it was ending the cycle of wildfires and then draining the prairie, ditching the sloughs and laying tile to carry away water that was good for wildlife and thick stands of native vegetation but not so good for alien row crops. In a modern Iowa soybean field in midsummer, it’s easy to see that fire isn’t much of a threat anymore. What’s hard to see is the drainage network that underlies much of the arable land in the state. Farmers are adding to it even now.

  The Iowa prairie was well and truly broken. Eighty percent of the state was once prairie and now it’s all but gone, replaced by what used to be mixed farms and are now corn and soybean fields. A couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful windswept day, I turned off the blacktop in Cherokee County, in northwest Iowa, onto a gravel road not far from the tiny town of Larabee. Down that road, two small pieces of land interrupted the symmetry of soybeans and corn. They totaled two hundred acres, a little more than half the average size of an Iowa farm last year. A sign identified this as the Steele Prairie Preserve. Another said, “Do Not Spray.” There was a wide spot in the road with room for one car. That was it, except for the wind and what that small prairie remnant implied.

  Standing at the edge of that swath of unmowed, unsprayed, untilled vegetation was like visiting a small body of water preserved to commemorate what an ocean looked like before it was drained. Two hundred acres barely permits the word prairie, which implies a horizon-wide stretch of grassland. And yet for all its meagerness, the Steele Prairie Preserve suggests the grandeur to which it had once belonged. It had been kept alive by a family that cut wild prairie hay from it well after their neighbors were planting hybrid corn and alfalfa. Biological complexity and diversity sound like abstractions, until you see them flourishing beside the monotony of a soybean field, a whole county of soybean fields. These acres could only hint at the way real prairie would reflect the wind—catching its oceanic sweep—and yet the wind was different here. Instead of the rustling newsprint sound of corn and soybeans, there was a breezy hush that seemed to merge with the birdsong rising from the community of tallgrass plants. It was a richer note than anything you hear in a pasture or a hayfield, if only because no one ever lets a pasture or hayfield grow so tall.

  There are tiny stands of native prairie all across the Midwest, in graveyards, along rail lines, in parks, and in floodplains
. Most are only a few acres, and it takes work to keep them from being invaded by nonnative plants. In states where the prairies were richest, like Iowa, those last stands serve as much to remind people of oxen shouldering the plows forward as to preserve the species that once made up the great sweeps of grasses and forbs. It’s always been easier to see the wealth of the black soil that lay under the prairie than the wealth of the prairie itself. I saw that soil freshly turned by a moldboard plow at a threshing bee in Granite, Iowa, and its blackness was exhilarating.

  There’s no getting back to the prairies, of course. The time for preserving a greater share of them slipped away even as modern agriculture was coming into its stride. The great figure in preserving Iowa’s prairies was Dr. Ada Hayden, and she died in 1950, after canvassing the state for remnants worth setting aside. And though the prairie restoration movement has gathered force, it takes more than the right collection of species and the best of intentions. It means regenerating the elemental forces of nature, unleashing a biological synergy that dwarfs what we usually mean by that word. To this day the Steele Prairie Preserve is maintained by fire. Standing at its edge, I wished I could be there to see it burn.

  August 23

  I don’t remember when I gave up. Perhaps I still haven’t. But so far, this goes down as the summer I grew no vegetables. Potatoes volunteered and so did some garlic and chives and a single cornstalk. Last year’s radishes did all they could. The blueberries set fruit copiously this year, but then all they ask is acidity and mulch. In mid-May I spent the better part of two weeks preparing the soil, creating a seed bed in the upper garden and tilling the lower one. Then the deluge came. Lindy worked in the perennial beds in a rain-suit for the entire month of June. I discovered I’m a fair-weather gardener. I want to plant my garden seeds in rows, not runnels. Still, I notice that local gardeners who weren’t deterred by endless rain are reaping the benefits now.

  Every day the vegetable plots nagged at me. One of them still does, its perfect vacant tilth preaching a stern lesson about timeliness. But the lower garden has taken matters into its own hands. It has rioted. Every weed seed that lay dormant has sent up a skyrocket of growth. If you can just get past the ethical question—these are weeds in what was a vegetable garden last year—there’s real beauty in the confusion. Mullein spikes tangle with branching thistles. A hummingbird browses the jewelweed thickets. Bees clamber everywhere, rummaging in and out of blossoms. A hops vine has run its way to the top of a column of motherwort and dangles there, with nowhere higher to go. The goldenrod are just coming into their late summer color, looking almost cultivated in their elegance compared to the rest of this menagerie. The vegetation has locked arms. It says, “Keep Out.” And so I do.

  This mess has reminded me of the true generosity of a well-kept vegetable garden. By late August, tomato plants or cornstalks or cucumber-vines are making offerings everywhere you turn, saying, “Here,” presenting perfectly wrapped packages of ripeness. Compared to the bristling self-determination of a full-grown burdock, a tomato plant dangling ripe fruit looks a little overeager. Can a bed of mesclun really be as ingenuous as it seems?

  Of course, the tangle in the lower garden is no more natural than the perfectly ordered beds of a true potager, and no more unnatural either. It merely announces the absence, the expiration of human labor. I think about reconquering that plot, and the thought of it wears me out. But I have a pair of allies who will make all the difference in the end. In a week or two, long before the worst of the weeds have gone to seed, I’ll move the pig house into that garden and turn the boys loose. It will be a joy to see them doing what they do best.

  October 27

  One of the Saxony drakes in our flock—five months old—died last Sunday, on a bright fall afternoon. Why he died, I don’t know. Not a feather had been ruffled. No blood or broken bones or signs of distress. He lay in the duckpen, relaxed, half-hidden by nettles, while the rest of the flock marched back and forth across the lawn, as they always do, stopping to agitate the grass with their bills and probe the roots to see what’s stirring. The only thing unusual was death itself, which lies invisible on the other side of each of the creatures on our small farm, and of us, too, of course.

  The ducks have never liked being picked up, not even when they were a day old and living under warm lights in the basement. They have a sense of personal autonomy and flock coherence that’s much stronger than it is in chickens, who are wily individuals in comparison. So I took the opportunity to hold the Saxony under one arm and look him over closely. It made me think of the days, long ago, when being a serious ornithologist meant being a good shot.

  I opened the webs on the Saxony’s feet, which had relaxed in death—as if on the forestroke while paddling—and ran my fingers over his covert feathers and through his deep down. I could see the hornlike reinforcement on the prow of his bill, called the bean, and the fringing along the back of the bill—a kind of bird baleen—that allowed him to filter water. I could feel the sudden, mournful density of his weight. His massive bluff gray head and neck had lost its arch in death, but some strange new dignity had come to him, too. The inherent comedy of his everyday manner—the way his feet waddled around his barnyard keel, his depth of body—had been replaced by the staggering intricacy and beauty of his feathering seen up close.

  We often think of stone as the great revealer of time, the preserver of geological patterns and fossils that teach us how ancient this world really is. But even something as ephemeral as the finger-thick down on this drake’s belly and the feel of subcutaneous fat beneath it seemed utterly suffused with time, the evolutionary time needed to create them. In our lives, we make steady, categorical distinctions between the present moment and the past, as if the two could never meet. And yet the beautiful brown cape on this Saxony’s shoulders, each feather tipped with a band of white, carried the deep past of evolution directly into the present, where I stood with the drake under my arm, watching the leaves whirl away from summer into fall, while the rest of the flock grazed nearby as if this were just another good day to be a duck.

  November 28

  Life is full of things you’d never think of doing until someone tells you not to. Casting pearls before swine is one of them. I’ve never owned pearls, but I do own a pair of swine. They’re handsome pigs, energetic, cheerful, full of advice when I show up with the dinner bucket. My wife has no pearls either, but over the past few months she and I have cast lots of things before our swine—fresh apples, pineapple rinds, buckets of roasted peanuts, bruised melons, a whole pickup load of spoiled sweet corn. The pigs snuffle it all up. I’d like to think that if we had pearls in the house, we’d toss them into the pigpen just to see what happens. What stops us is having been taught all these years never to cast pearls before swine. And no pearls.

  Even as a child I knew that the “pearls” in the phrase were really one’s own good qualities or talents. Don’t waste them on the rabble was the gist of the saying. But I lived in the Midwest, where something that sounds like a farm saying usually was a farm saying. Swine may be a figure of speech in other parts of the country, but where I grew up there were many more swine than metaphors. The pigs I knew best belonged to my uncle Everon. When I was young he seemed like a stern man to me, sterner and sterner the closer we got to the pigpen. He wasn’t about to throw pearls before swine or let me do so either. Keeping pearls away from the pigs was just practical advice—the start of a long list of things to keep out of the pigpen, including batteries, lightbulbs, and baby brothers.

  It’s worth remembering that this warning about pigs and jewelry first appears in the Sermon on the Mount. It dates from a time when swine ran free and when, just walking down to the mailbox, you could find yourself cornered by pigs demanding pearls. In those days, casting your pearls before swine might have been a good idea.

  I’ve tried over the years to apply this saying to humans and their behavior, to cultivate the cautiousn
ess and the reserve it suggests. But it never really works. At its heart that saying contains an arrogance I’m not really comfortable with. Separating the sheep from the goats is one thing when it comes to humans. Separating the sheep from the goats from the swine is something else entirely. I’m just not up to it. Especially because the saying seems to take it for granted that pigs are nasty, brutish animals, incapable of appreciating the finer things in life.

  But I’ve found swine to be tolerant creatures, trusting, sincere, and completely honest. They repay kind treatment—an extra apple, a bellyrub, a squirt from the water hose on a hot summer day—with real joy. And if they mainly associate me with breakfast and dinner, that’s my fault. I don’t spend nearly enough time in the pen hanging out with them, trying to see things as they see them. They see me coming and, frankly, I look like a bushel of pig feed. But the moral is really this. You don’t want to hoard your pearls unless you’re sure they’re pearls. And you don’t want to decide that the world is full of swine until you’re sure you know what you mean when you say “swine.” I’d be proud to think that my pigs saw only the best of me.

  December 6

  By 2:30 the other morning, the moon had dropped well down in the west, behind the birches. Just enough snow had fallen to reflect the moon’s light. While the dogs ran around the pasture, hoping it was already breakfast-time, I looked at the stars, which were washed out by the vaporous glow in the sky. It was almost as light as it is on a dark December noon, when the clouds look like snow and the chickens are already thinking of roosting. By early afternoon, the two turkeys, Tom and Pearl, flutter up to their high roost above the chicken-yard fence. The horses are already giving me significant looks over the pasture gate. The ducks have laid a trail of cuneiform footprints back to the duckpen through the snow. My day too contracts with the natural light. I become just one of the animals.