More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  The thought of all these highways occurred to me somewhere between Crow Agency, Montana, and the Wyoming border—part of the longer drive from Billings to Sheridan. In the past dozen years I’ve driven that stretch of highway dozens of times. It rolls up out of the lowland along the Yellowstone River—past the refineries and the Billings livestock auction—into a great sweep of wheat-land. It cuts across the Crow Reservation, over a shoulder of the Rosebud Mountains, and down into the Tongue River drainage.

  There are times on that highway when I feel motionless even at eighty miles an hour. And there have been night drives when it felt like every mile had to be won against my own fatigue. Often, the car begins to buck whenever it gets crosswise to the wind, which has no impediments out there. When I first began making that trip, it still had the feel of a mythic journey, pushing backwards in time. It wasn’t the Crow Reservation that made me feel that way or the signs for Little Bighorn. It was the lay of the land, the rimrock, the grasses, the antelope racing across the plains.

  But if you spend enough time in the West, the myths erode, and what you’re left with is an actual landscape. In a dry year, a vast swath of wheat burns black. Another year, the radio is suddenly full of Christian stations, a mixture of salvation rock and hometown choirs coming over the air. On one trip, a golden eagle nearly lands on the hood of the car. On another, I wake up from my daydream and find myself closing in fast on a sugar-beet truck headed for Billings, a single light flashing slowly on its tail. The beets look prehistoric, like lumps of matter waiting to be formed into walking, breathing creatures eager to know their creator.

  I’m only an occasional traveler on this road, of course. I’ve missed the blizzards that shut it down from time to time, though I’ve caught more than enough of the thunderstorms, black as a burned wheatfield in the sky. A couple of months ago, I drove all the way from Hardin to Garryowen under the most violent rainbow I’ve ever seen, a dense wall of color shimmering overhead.

  This last time, I left Sheridan after a hard autumn frost. In the pastures along the highway, the horses seemed to have frozen solid overnight. They held themselves motionless, broadside to the rising sun, in all of the postures available to their kind. One stood with eyes closed, ears pricked backwards. Another lay with front legs folded under, its neck arched so that only its muzzle touched the ground. Some stood clumped together in frozen bands amid frozen herds of cattle. There was no breeze to sweep their tails or manes. Mile after mile, pasture after pasture, the illusion held, as if I were driving through a land of cryogenic beasts. Then the morning sun took hold, and they all came to life again.

  December 15

  Every year I try to figure out what it means to be ready for winter. Every winter brings a different answer. One year the chimney gets cleaned, one year the rain gutters. One year I stack enough wood to heat us through May, and one year the garden gets put to bed properly. But I’ve never managed to make all these things happen in the same year. The only constant is hay. There’s always enough of it, stacked well before the leaves have finished falling. The horses insist.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I’m always preparing for a different winter than the one that comes. I discovered that you can muddle through a hard winter. The power mostly stays on. The oil man comes on a regular schedule. The phone never goes out. Sometimes, well below zero, the yard hydrants freeze up, but with a little heat tape they thaw again. Even in the dead of winter the wood man will make a delivery, though calling him feels like a sober confession of failure.

  The last two winters in the Hudson Valley were brutal. Yet they weren’t as long or hard or dark as I expected them to be. The winter solstice comes and goes before the real cold begins. No matter how bitter it gets in January, it won’t be getting any darker. The season is always more transitional than it seems, as fleeting as summer. Every day is headway toward spring.

  Sometimes I imagine preparing for a winter you can’t muddle through. It’s a deep arboreal season. Time pauses and then pauses again. The sun winks over the horizon, glinting on a snow-swept lake—just enough light to wake the chickadees. The eave is low all around the house this winter comes to, and I’ve surrounded the entire house with cordwood, leaving gaps for the windows and doors. Winter will go nowhere until I’ve burned it all. I have no plans except to rake the snow off the roof after the next big blizzard and carry out the ashes from the woodstove and read everything I’ve ever meant to read.

  A daydream like this isn’t really about winter or snow or firewood or even the feeling of having prepared every last thing that needs preparing. It’s about something far more elemental, the time that moves through us day by day. It’s an old human hope—to have a consciousness separate from the consciousness of time—but it’s always a vain one. I’ll never get that much cordwood stacked and I’ll never need to. Winter comes and goes in the same breath, condensing right before your face on a day when the temperature never hits twenty.

  Year

  FOUR

  January 13

  There’s really no counting the roads you never expect to find yourself on. But you know it when you suddenly find yourself on one of them. I came upon such a route a couple of weeks ago in the midst of a cross-country drive—US Highway 84, from Lubbock, Texas, to Clovis, New Mexico. Once you’re in Lubbock, the odds of ending up on Highway 84 are pretty good. We’d planned on cutting across Texas farther north, through Amarillo. But a powerful winter storm pushed us south from Little Rock, Arkansas, where the ways divide. Instead of going through Oklahoma City, which was coated in ice, we drove through Texarkana and Dallas and Abilene instead, bound for Santa Fe and points west. Hence, Lubbock.

  So says the logic of the roads. We got up three mornings in a row, drove all day, and turned up in Lubbock. That city was nowhere in my thoughts when we pulled out of the driveway at home. Yet there we were, and happy to be there after another day spent in the interstate backwash of a wet winter storm. We glimpsed a patch of blue sky for a moment in central Tennessee, but never once the sun. It was dark when we pulled into Lubbock, late, and it was dark when we rose the next morning in a dense, freezing fog.

  Lubbock lies at the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado—the Staked Plains—one of the strange, dire places in the American imagination. It was trackless once, a nearly featureless, grassy plain between the Canadian River to the north and the Pecos to the west, a place where the very idea of direction seemed to vanish, where every heading seemed equally unpromising. Coronado crossed it in his delusory wanderings, bewildered by its scale. To me it had been only a beautiful name—Llano Estacado. I’d filled in the promise of so much bareness, such a flat expanse of grass, with grim imaginings, wanderers doomed to lose their way and their horses and their lives.

  But there was no losing the track out of Lubbock even in the fog. US 84 angled northwest, and as the sun begin to regain its grip it became clear that the inhabitants of the Llano Estacado had found plenty of water by mining the Ogallala Aquifer beneath it. This is one of the few places in America where you can still find a windmill repair shop. Dark brown cotton fields stretched away in every direction, the even terrain broken only by enormous loaves of cotton—bales the size of semitrailers—covered with blue tarps. In some fields the bolls still clung to the plants, and now and then a drift of cotton came rolling across the highway like miniature, bleached tumbleweeds.

  Where the cotton fields ended, there stood enormous dairies, cows grazing on smooth, sodlike plains irrigated by prehistoric water from the aquifer below. It was as though the hillside pastures of Vermont had moved westward with the herds that once grazed them. Despite the expanse of the plains—perhaps because of them—agriculture here is as industrial in its nature as the oil fields farther south near Midland and Odessa.

  Overnight the trees had taken on a thick coating of ice. The sparse groves around distant farmsteads glowed white in the accumulating light. Towns like Sudan and Mules
hoe were overshadowed by their cotton gins, by the feel small farm towns always give off on a cold morning, no matter what the local crop happens to be. Day was rising with new energy. By the time we got to Muleshoe, the hopes of seeing real sun—a blue sky, horizon to horizon—seemed more than just a pipedream for the first time in nearly two thousand miles.

  The wonder of a road like that is its actuality. You can pull onto the shoulder, stop the car, and walk over to feel the cotton bolls or take in the effluvial aroma of the dairies. You can drive up the main street of Clovis and feel the bricks on the roadway rumbling under your tires or contemplate the enormous “Santa Fe” sign marking the railroad tracks as you head back to the highway. No matter what you may think of where you are, no matter how you once imagined it, you are implacably there—not where you used to be, not where you’re going, but there. What you see along the way gathers inside you like a dust storm or a haystack or any other metaphor that seems appropriate to this tail end of the high plains.

  January 20

  My wife and I recently drove from the farm to California. The trip had a narrative. It was called Middlemarch, by George Eliot. We slipped the first cassette into the car stereo somewhere near Albany—“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty...”—and we finished the last one—“and rest in unvisited tombs”—somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno. In heavy traffic, or when one of us wanted to sleep, we turned the novel off. The rest of the time we listened. It so happens that America is as wide as Middlemarch is long, at seventy mph along the Southern route.

  A novel is really a temporal creation. It’s as much about the ways in which time passes in the story and in the reader’s awareness of the story as it is about anything else. If you sat in a room and read Middlemarch or listened to it being read, you’d become very aware of the time it took. But for us the novel became a spatial creation. It was as though we were driving along a pavement of Eliot’s sentences laid end to end across the country, the ink as black as asphalt. Now and then—Eliot does have occasional longueurs—we found ourselves working our way up a difficult passage, climbing a switchback from clause to clause. But for the most part it was smooth sailing. It felt as though the occupants of Middlemarch, that provincial town, were riding along with us in the back seat—Peter Featherstone and Mary Garth and poor Lydgate.

  I’d read Middlemarch several times, but I’d never heard it. No matter how well you remember a novel you’ve read, hearing it read aloud is like finding another book within it. I’d forgotten how vividly Eliot captures the gossiping life of Middlemarch—how distinct the voices of even the smallest characters could be as they talk about the coming of the railway or the chances of reform or the troubles of the evangelical Mr. Bulstrode. Lindy and I rode along, cocooned in the voices we were hearing, and the acoustic space within the car became a psychological space, a place where we could watch Eliot dissect, with a surgeon’s grace, the inner mind of Dorothea Brooke.

  Outside the trucks roared past, or we roared past the trucks. The Virginia countryside gave way to Tennessee and Arkansas and Texas and finally New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Wooden fences gave way to barbed wire and welded pipe. The landscape was American, of course—an America adulterated by the effects of I-40. And yet we also drove from New York to California by way of Loamshire, the fictional county in which Middlemarch is set. It should have seemed incongruous to be hearing about “the hayricks at Stone Court” while looking out at the brush of west Texas, and yet it wasn’t. The weather seemed to darken whenever we entered Mr. Casaubon’s thoughts, and it brightened whenever Dorothea appeared, no matter how hard the rain was falling.

  The human mind has a natural propensity to give in to the story at hand. We stop reading aloud when the kids get to a certain age, and yet there’s a craving for the sound of a story that never goes away. I suppose that if adults still read aloud to each other the way they did in centuries past, we would get a lot less reading done. I can certainly read Middlemarch much faster than I can listen to it. But when we got to California, one of the first things I did was get a copy of Middlemarch from the library. I seemed to recognize every sentence, as if this one were the water tower of a small Tennessee town and that one were a pasture in the oak hills of California.

  February 17

  We came over the mountains and down into Los Angeles a little more than a month ago. The heavy rains had subsided, and the hills were stationary again. Most of the roads and highways had reopened, though it was impossible, on certain routes, to get to San Juan Capistrano or Ojai or drive up Topanga Canyon. In Malibu, a landslide has nearly closed off a residential street and, beside it, steel buttresses keep the rest of the slope from coming down. Here and there blue tarps have been thrown across the hills to keep the slips from slipping further when the rains return. Up the coast, just south of Santa Barbara, the earth is still settling over the edge of La Conchita, where ten people died in a landslide last month.

  I felt a sudden claustrophobia when we came over the mountains, as if we’d left the mainland behind. I felt it again when we drove up Mount Baldy at night and looked out over the lights of the San Bernardino valley. The passes leading out of this great basin are so few, the mountains steep and brittle. But most of that unease has worn off. This is the wrong season for fire, and I think of earthquakes only when I’m idling under a freeway overpass, waiting for a light to change. I can feel the roadway rumbling overhead.

  What never goes away is the dread of real estate. It’s an utterly anomalous feeling. I meet perfectly pleasant people here—people whose lives differ from mine only in ordinary ways—and yet they seem extraordinary to me because they’re vested in California real estate. I think of it as a fable. You wake up one morning and find that overnight a giant beanstalk has sprouted under your house and lifted it high off the ground. The next night it happens again, and soon you’re in the clouds. The view would be terrifying—the plain earth is so far out of sight—except that all around you are other houses on other beanstalks.

  Most of our friends here live in modest houses—fifteen hundred square feet and under. But they live in immodest places. It’s literally nothing to come across a laborer’s cottage in Santa Barbara—built in the days when laborers could still afford to live there—appraised at nearly $1 million. A friend in Brentwood says that her sense of her house’s worth is always a decade behind the times. I think this is a sober defense against an unsettling unreality. What can it mean when the houses on one block in La Jolla are worth more than all the real property in the western half of South Dakota?

  I’ve been trying to decide whether this extraordinary escalation of property values produces hypermobility or immobility. The answer is probably both. One person trades upwards as quickly as he can. Another stays put, in the depressing assurance that even if she sells her two-bedroom bungalow for $1.2 million, she can only afford to buy the place next door. One thing is certain. Without the enormous equity bubble that seems to be floating California’s economy, all the Hummer dealerships would go out of business.

  In Los Angeles, time is equity. The money—swelling like a zucchini in August—changes everything. It brings a strange formality to the act of selling real estate, which here has become one of the theatrical professions. There’s something august, almost sacramental about the transfer of real property. It’s one of the grand rites of capitalism. Here that rite attains its highest pitch. All across town realtors peer down from billboards the way personal accident lawyers peer down from the billboards of Albuquerque. The photographs are meant to impose trust but what they really seem to be saying is, “Have You Seen This Woman?” A realtor and his clients stand in the drive of a house on San Vicente Boulevard. They look as though they’ve come for a wake. But they’re not in the presence of death, they’re in the presence of money. Not even present money. Future money.

  I suspect that there’s a symbiosis between these extraordinary inflating prices, which have a life of
their own, and the potential for natural disaster. By any real logic, the threat of wildfires and the collapse of sodden hillsides whose vegetation has been scorched away, not to mention the possibility of the Big One, should dampen the real estate market. But what reminds people of the Big One every day is the fact that it hasn’t happened yet.

  February 24

  The steady rain makes no difference to the sea lions and surfers. It seems to make no difference to the cattle grazing the coastal pastures. The oldest barns along this stretch of road—the coast highway an hour north of San Francisco—show a pale green, like a wash of sea-water, over the gray of the barn-wood. The sheep along the fence lines look almost as though they were fleeced with the Spanish moss hanging from oaks along the highway. The light is as variable as the rain and the salt breeze. Moisture catches in the manzanita and sage. Pastures stream with water, and creeks rumble down the cliff-face, making for the sea across open beach.

  So much water seems natural enough on the northern coast. Terrestrial life is half-aquatic there. But it’s been the same in Southern California, and not just on the coast. Last weekend, the whole of the Los Angeles basin looked and sounded like a sheet of tin roofing being pounded by rain. The region absorbed the rain about as well as a sheet of tin. At times, every street in the shadow of the San Gabriels was a desert wash choked by a deluge, the current sucking at the curb as it ran for the ocean, miles and miles away. In the aftermath, the streets have been scoured clean, but the sidewalks have silted up in the low spots. Fallen magnolia blossoms dam up pools of water along my walk to work.