More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  For the past couple of weeks, a flock of wild turkeys has wandered down from the woods just as I go out to feed in the mornings. They make a beeline for the corral where the pigs last lived. So do the chickens and the ducks and Tom and Pearl when I turn them out. The ducks and geese always cluster together. The chickens work the fringes, darting in and out among the wild turkeys. Pearl looks like a pale version of the wild hens that surround her. Tom spends the better part of the morning completely and futilely inflated, so dizzied by the presence of so many females that he can’t remember to eat. Food is the one thing on the wild turkeys’ minds.

  And yet every afternoon at dusk the wild turkeys glide back up the hill, and Tom and Pearl walk back into the chicken yard, reenacting the drama of domestication. I watch it with a feeling of gratification. Some mornings, Pearl drops down from her roost and lands outside the chicken yard. She waits till I open the door and then walks straight in, piping an electric song. This is something more than domestication on her part. It’s courtesy. I wonder if she can feel the tug to wildness and whether day’s end comes like a surrender to her. All I know is that this morning she dropped down outside the fence again, and when I last saw her she was walking up the hill in the midst of the wild turkeys. She gave me a look as if to say she’d be back before dark.

  December 16

  Like half of America, I came down with the flu recently. That means quarantine at the top of the house in a spare bedroom with a view of the sugar maple and the pasture beyond it, where the horses are standing in falling snow. I was raised to believe that sleep is a sovereign remedy for everything but death, so I drift between waking and sleeping, visited mostly by one of the cats, who likes the third floor—a converted attic—as much as I do. I wake just long enough to see the snow falling, and to judge how sick I feel, before drifting off again. The pleasure of it—waking only long enough to know you’re dozing—confirms something one of Ishmael’s shipmates said in Moby Dick: “Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep.”

  Wet snow blows in from the east, and then after a day or so, the weather pivots and a hard wind strikes up from the west, gusting from its heels. That’s when I can feel the age of this house. The windows rattle. The attic exhaust fan clanks open and shut. The mudroom takes on a chill that lasts till spring. Sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night, I go down to the kitchen and feed the woodstove. But in quarantine, I might as well be sleeping on the roof. That’s how far away the woodstove feels. Every now and then the furnace fires up as if to say to me that it’s on my side.

  The horses stand blanketed in snow, and from time to time they lope around the pasture just to listen to the icicles on their flanks. It takes a foul night to drive them under cover. The wild turkeys stroll down out of the woods and along the driveway and right up to the mudroom door, as if they were going to knock and come in to get warm. I have yet to see the weather that makes any difference to the ducks or geese. Only the chickens shy away in the snow. They stay snug on their roosts, darning their socks, and, for some reason, our tom turkey has decided to join them.

  The wind rises, snow twists in the air, and the old honey locust on the edge of the garden cracks and booms like it’s being detonated from within. I expect it to go over any minute. Everyone finds the lee of something to stand in until the wind drops again. As for me, I lie here in the lee of the flu, astonished by the health, the vigor of everything around me, including the crows that huddle on the sugar maple outside, dark clumps of shadow in a white world.

  Year

  THREE

  March 9

  You don’t really notice a skunk’s smell. It notices you. It loiters in the air, nearly sentient, waiting to knock you down, strong enough to make you wonder how a skunk can smell anything but itself. I walked into a fresh scent on my way to the barn one morning just past. There were no tracks or signs of digging in the snow. But in the warmth of that afternoon I heard the sound of bees, and I saw where the sound was coming from. The skunk had attacked a corner of one of the hives in the night. Its claws hadn’t done much damage, only enough to open a crack. The bees were trying to patch it with propolis. They wouldn’t have been out without the skunk’s provocation. But there was the answer to one of winter’s most pressing questions: Are the bees still strong in the hive?

  A farm is naturally a place of bold scents, though most of them seem to have been bottled up by the sharp cold of this past winter. A thaw releases them. Late winter smells like a very old barnyard. It suddenly hits me how long it’s been since I cleaned the henhouse. But the real sign of a February thaw is the skunks. They begin to come out into the margins of daylight in the same week the highways start to heave with frost. To drive around here is to feel your way along a lurching roadway from one slick of skunk scent to the next. Sometimes I pass a skunk just changing its mind at the edge of my headlights. More often I see those that kept right on going and didn’t make it. They leave in the air an immortality all their own.

  I knocked together the corner of the hive that had been clawed apart. A couple of bees spurted out and droned around my head. But they weren’t serious. This is a gentle colony. Whether the skunk found them so gentle I don’t know. I’ve heard that a skunk will disturb a hive not to get at the honey but to eat the bees that mob him. I’ve also heard that a skunk’s smell can travel well more than a mile downwind. They say, in fact, that skunks in winter don’t really hibernate. They den up, five or six females with one male, and sleep deeply through the cold weather. The least thaw rouses them to hunger and desire. They stir from their nests and amble down to the road, as if drawn there by something only skunks can know. They wait in the night, trying to decide whether the highway selects for boldness or hesitation.

  April 9

  Until a few days ago, the biggest tree on our farm was a century-old honey locust at the edge of an embankment overlooking the lower pasture. There are other big trees on this place—hemlocks and hickories and one old sugar maple that looks like something out of The Faerie Queene. But a few years ago the honey locust began dropping major limbs after windstorms, and with each dropped limb it seemed to reach higher and higher into the sky. What kept it standing I don’t know. The core of the trunk had decayed into dirt-red frass. The tree leaned into the northeast, where the worst of our storms begin, and perhaps that made a difference. In the end, it was only the strength of the wood itself, a kind of cellular will, that kept it standing.

  But last Wednesday two men in a white pickup pulled into the driveway. It was a quiet consult. They walked around and around the tree while Lindy and I watched. “One scary tree,” the older man said. The younger started his chainsaw and let it idle on the ground while he walked down to the spot where we hoped the tree would fall. With the saw he nipped off the Virginia Creeper vines running up the trunk, each one as thick as my upper arm. He inscribed a few lines in the bark at the base of the tree where he wanted to make his incisions. Then the saw began to scream in earnest.

  The horses watched from the round pen in the big pasture, locked away from this sudden change in the scenery. The chickens lined up at the edge of their yard and watched, too. It was a still day, but suddenly in the branches high above us there was an abrupt lurch—more earthquake than gale. Then a pause. The locust began to give in to gravity, and fell. I don’t even remember the sound. I expected the earth-shaking whump I’d felt when I’d felled sounder trees myself. But the locust had been ready to come apart, and come apart it did. The three dimensions of its crown crashed into two dimensions on the ground, leaving its silhouette scattered across the garden. I wrote a check, thought again about buying a log splitter, and went inside to work.

  That afternoon I climbed the locust where it lay. The stump was now nothing more than a hollow atoll surrounded by a grass-green sea where waves of snowdrops were cresting, about to break. I peered inside the riven trunk and found a red d
esert of dry, tunneled heartwood, adult beetles entombed at the end of each tunnel waiting for the fullness of spring to chew their way out. I pulled a squirrel’s nest out of the bole, high up. Above me the crows sat in the hickory tops, considering this fresh hole in the sky.

  April 21

  In the Northeast the word bench doesn’t mean much as a description of landscape. The terrain is simply too tangled and wooded, the views too short. But the word comes into its own in Montana. The mountains there dominate the view, their ranges rising almost naively against the sky: the Madison, the Gravelly, the Tobacco Root. Where the mountains stop, the benches begin, great alluvial fans that shelve outward from the base of the mountains to the middle of a broad, shallow valley. There, a river is trenching its way between the benches.

  I drove not long ago along the edge of the enormous bench that sweeps westward from Ruby Mountain and overlooks the Beaverhead Valley. Down in the thick of the valley, the river seemed to be slowly choking itself, twisting this way and that, hiding its true extent in bogs and alders and brush. If you looked at Beaverhead Rock, you could almost imagine the valley as it looked when Lewis and Clark came through. They found that “beaver were basking in great numbers along the shore.”

  But up on the bench, flocks of sandhill cranes courted each other in the shadow of giant irrigation rigs, which were dwarfed by the ground they had to cover. Tractors were working the earth into a dustlike tilth, and in the ranchyards rose great mounds of seed potatoes, which were being loaded into semitrucks bound for Idaho and planting. The bench beyond—that broad swath of dry grass—created an optical illusion. Without a point of reference—a line of utility poles, a house in the near distance—it was almost impossible to judge how far the bench ran. It was just short of prairie, open range for the wind.

  Down in the pastures, closer to the river, it looked as though the sky had rained calves a few weeks earlier. Once every day or so, a rancher would drive a tractor through his pastures, pulling an implement that shaves hay off a round bale. The mother cows and their calves stood along that line of hay, grazing, and they bedded down along it, too. From the sky you would have seen great underscorings of black cattle all across the county. A couple of fences away, Angus bulls waited placidly for the coming weeks, when their call will come.

  We always think of ferocity when we think of bulls. But in herds of their own sex, they can be perfect gentlemen. While fishing one day, I watched a group of bulls make their way down to a triangle of fence that reached into the river. There was room for only one bull at its apex, and they took turns edging into that corner and backing out again so the next bull could drink. I wondered if they noticed the tiny mayflies—the Baetis—making their way downstream in the film.

  At some point, most anglers begin to wonder why they fish. Over the years the reasons pile up into a beaver dam of arguments, tangled this way and that, some more reasonable than others. I’ve come to a point in my fishing life where I simply like walking down the drainage—seeing where the streambed goes, where the tributaries enter, where the view rises from. Standing in the low spots is a good way to see the world. Nearly everything comes down to the water sooner or later.

  And along the river, the landscape shrinks. All that’s left is the rim of the benches and the mountains beyond them. After a day on the river, the world seems to be reduced to its essentials—light along the peaks and motion in the stream itself. But then daylight begins to tail off and, after hours of hard fishing, you start to see motion wherever you look, as though the river had gone still and a current were now flowing through the sagebrush and the rocks beyond. The only way to stop that illusory flow is to go back up onto the bench where nothing seems to move except the sandhill cranes flirting in the distance.

  May 21

  About a month ago, a Phoebe began building a nest of moss on a light fixture under the eave above the kitchen door. It looked like futility. Every time the door opened, she fluttered away, and there always seemed to be as much moss on the threshold as there was on the nest. But now the nest is done, and she broods happily, only her beak and tail visible. Sometimes on a still evening, her mate perches on a stone pillar at the edge of the deck, tail dipping up and down. He looks over at me, where I sit, and then flutters upward to take a bug in midflight. I go in after the bats are on the wing. I look up at the nest just above my head, and I close the door as quietly as I can.

  Under the old chicken house, the Ancona duck is brooding, too. It’s hard to know when she found time to build a nest. As a flock, the ducks and geese walk a mile a day. I’d always thought of them as aquatic creatures, but then I’d never seen a drake run after his mate in breeding season. All winter the poultry live in a fenced run. When bare ground shows through the snow, we throw open the doors for what we’ve come to call a “poultry holiday.” But now the grass is green, and every day is a holiday. The ducks and geese waddle off down the drive, into the lower pasture, around the back of the barn, over the high ridge into the middle pasture, where one of the quarter horses—Ida—herds them back down the hill to their yard. Meanwhile, the Ancona sits, deep in a caldera of down and straw. A Wyandotte hen sits in a galvanized tub in the new chicken house, too. She has been fooled by an old glass nest egg, put there to show the young hens where to lay.

  The phoebe’s chicks will be altricial—hatched nearly naked and immobile, with eyes closed. They’ll need the constant attention and feeding of both parents—and we’ll need to stop using the kitchen door. The ducklings will be precocial, alarmingly alert, downy, and dependent on their mother mainly for heat. We got our annual lesson in precocial last week when the baby chicks we’d ordered arrived from Iowa. When Lindy picked them up from the post office, they were a day old, still ingesting the last of the yolk. We dipped their beaks in water and turned them loose on the floor of a water tank with a heat lamp overhead. They rocketed around the tank as fast as they could run—stretching their legs after the flight. A fly cruised over the tank, and all the chicks looked up, hoping it would fly a little lower.

  June 1

  For nearly as long as there have been humans, there have been laws defining the status of animals, reserving them for certain uses and for certain people. Those laws, some of them unbelievably cruel, are meant to pattern human behavior without any reference to an animal’s autonomous right to exist. If the game laws implicitly acknowledged the value of a pheasant’s existence, it was only as an item of human property. America’s hunting laws have the same idea behind them, if more democratically expressed.

  It’s a dramatic shift to put laws on the books that assert an animal’s property in itself and protect it from any human use whatsoever. The Endangered Species Act is an extraordinary monument to human self-awareness and our awareness of the world around us. It says that for certain species—determined by vulnerability, not by any obvious human value—we’re willing to place their interests ahead of ours. As an act of conscience, it’s hard to beat.

  What got me thinking about this was an endangered sea turtle, a Kemp’s ridley female. She lay in the back of a pickup truck on Padre Island, Texas, a few miles north of the national seashore. Her shell was nearly circular, almost exactly the size of a manhole cover, and there was an unexpected concavity on her left side. The truck bed was lined with a blue plastic tarp, which kept slipping under the turtle as she tried to climb out. She had just laid a nest full of eggs, and as soon as the scientists on hand had taken a blood sample and inserted a tag, the turtle would be lifted out of the bed and released on the beach—bound for the Gulf of Mexico a few dozen yards away.

  An endangered species sounds like an item of arbitration, a bureaucratic pigeonhole. But there was nothing abstract about this turtle. She showed a painful determination to get out of the truck bed and back onto the sand. It had taken the same determination to stride out of the surf, walk across the sea-wrack—a ridge of seaweed cluttered with plastic debris and stranded Portuguese me
n-of-war—and lay her eggs up the beach. A marine biologist lowered her from the bed onto the sand. I helped hold her in place while the final tag was inserted. I kneeled directly in front of her and placed my hands on what I thought of as her shoulders. She drove against me, the last human obstacle between her and the gulf. The wind blew, and behind me the surf roared. Then it was time to let go.

  When she moved at last, she marched briskly down the sand, between a double cordon of onlookers—beachcombers and tourists who had happened upon the scene. The turtle rested for a few minutes, then struck out again. She nosed her way over the tidal debris, and then the biologist lifted her over a driftwood log that lay in her path. From there it was a clean break for the sea, down the slick sand and into the pooling backwash of the surf. I watched until the crest of her shell had gone under and the last swirls caused by her powerful strokes had been gathered up in a new in-rush of water.

  It was one of those rare moments when you suddenly realize, viscerally, the profound otherness—the astonishing sufficiency—of nature. Habitat barely suggests the convergence between the turtle and the sea she re-entered. It was more than aptness, more than fittedness. It seemed, at the moment of reentry, to have the force of an atomic bond.