More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  For the last two months, the local news in Southern California has been about nothing but houses tumbling downhill and highways blocked by mudslides, about yellow tags and red tags and the threat of evacuation. But there’s another news here, whether the sun shines or not. It’s the green of the hills. No one remembers this much rain, and no one remembers this much green. Green is beginning to fail as a word. It begins to feel unmeaning, a word you can imagine Caliban practicing on the beach, trying out the sound of it over and over again. To look at the hills and say the word green is ridiculous. The question is which green on what plant and in what light and facing in which direction and are we talking about new growth or old? The blue of the sky—even in the profligate light of Southern California—is simple in comparison.

  Where the freeways cut through the low hills, there’s a sudden sweep of prairie. It feels as though you could pull onto the shoulder, get out of your car, and walk to Nebraska knee-deep in spring grass with the broad sun on your back. But the real complexity of color emerges where the hills fold inward, hollows and canyons falling away from the highway toward some hidden termination. Crossing the Grapevine in a downpour a few days ago we came up short against a rockslide that had spilled across the road. The highway—beige and gray—seemed to have trapped us in a monotonous band of color, as if we were only allowed to drive along one or two wavelengths in the spectrum of visible light. But beyond the roadway, out across the hills, the new grass intensified toward a green that seemed to surpass human vision, as if it were visible only to grazing beasts.

  In the last few weeks, I suppose I’ve seen every green I’ve ever seen. All except one, and that was a vermilion moss growing along a streamside on a glacier in Iceland. Even that green is probably growing here somewhere. But there’s also a green here that I imagine I’ll never find anywhere else. We saw it south of Bakersfield just after sunrise a few days ago. The last violent storm had flung itself apart, and the clouds over the Sierras had lifted just enough to show the snow that had crept far down their slopes overnight. Rows of grapevines ran in perfectly even corridors from the highway to the foothills, miles away, where the morning was just beginning to take hold. The sunlight caught those hills just so. The distant oaks broke the light. The moisture in the air above the pastures diffused it. The storm clouds restrained all but the lower rays of the sun. I’d give the color of those hills at that moment a name if I knew it. And that’s just one of the names I don’t know when I look up into the hills.

  March 9

  Ever since I got to Southern California, people have been reminding me that this part of the world has its seasons too. I always agree. I can think of at least four seasons in Los Angeles—rain, fire, escrow, and the Academy Awards. There’s an old Midwestern guilt in that need to account for the seasons here. I think of all the Iowa families that moved to California about the same time my family did, in the mid-1960s. Most of them, in that first generation, found it hard to spend an extra cent. Lying in the sun—just lying there!—seemed an unaccountable waste of time. They could barely allow themselves the pleasure of eating outdoors without fussing over the pleasure of eating outdoors. Telling the ones who stayed in the Midwest that there are seasons here too was a kind of cultural negotiation, a way of saying, “We’re not all that different just because we live in California and eat artichokes now.” A growing season 365 days long felt like a plenary indulgence, even if you were Methodist.

  Any place with as many climates—or as much climate, allowing the word its salutary overtones—as Southern California doesn’t really need seasons. Drive from San Juan Capistrano, over the Santa Ana Mountains on the Ortega Highway, up through Riverside to the snowpack on the San Bernardino Mountains and you cross any number of climatic zones, each enjoying a season unto itself. Southern California reminds you that climate is a function of place and season is a function of time.

  A climatic zone may be tiny—no larger than a damp winter creek-bottom in an otherwise arid landscape. And a season here may be only a matter of days as well. One day feels like sodden winter, and by the evening of the next day, the middle school girls are playing soccer under the field lights, the shriek of referee whistles cutting through the warm night air. Summer comes over and over and over. As a result, everyone is equipped to seize it the instant it appears.

  I sense the encroaching season here readily enough—the way a plum-blossom spring overlaps with the constancy of agave and yucca. But I miss the Northeastern sense of time. The days are longer than they were when we got here. And yet it’s hard to feel their lengthening, thanks to the orange perma-glow in the urban sky at night. But it’s also because light isn’t the cue my students are really waiting for. They are keenly and hormonally sensitive to climatic disturbance, and they’re waiting—the whole region with them—for warm nights. Here, every night, unless it’s pouring, is a convertible night. But with real warmth, the stoicism of keeping the top down will give way to the sybaritic pleasure of merging with the biotic city, all those beings feasting on air.

  Whenever I think of where we are in the year, I think of home and the winter it’s been having. I can imagine the operatic movement of the light, the way each day reaches a little farther into the darkness of morning and evening than the one before. Those extra minutes of dawn and dusk are almost pure emotion this time of year, as though something had been reclaimed that was in danger of disappearing forever. It seems sometimes as though that place—its snowy pastures, its huddled woods—is on a separate globe, pursuing a more elliptical path around the sun than planet Los Angeles.

  The irises are in bloom here in Southern California. But what’s an iris? It’s something won back from the cold and the snow, a rigorous assertion that winter may come again but only by going through summer first. That’s not what the irises say here. They’re blooming along with roses and oranges and birds of paradise and rosemary and lavender and camellias. To me it makes no sense, no matter how beautiful it is. Something is always blooming in this nectared city.

  May 20

  Over the past few months in Los Angeles, old memories have come back to me. Most of them aren’t really memories of the place as it was when I last lived in the area thirty-some years ago. They’re memories of illusions. The otherness of other lives weighs heavily on my imagination, and to drive, as a young man, along elevated freeways, peering out into the palm-dotted neighborhoods was to be overcome by other lives. Los Angeles seemed far stranger to me then than it has these past few months. The difference may be age, but it may also be Los Angeles.

  It was a less respectable city, as I remember it. It was the great city for starting over, where you could repair your respectability or ditch it, once and for all. I had relatives who tried both, who became school teachers and settled into the middle groove or turned John Birch and stopped paying income tax. You never knew how that city would take an Iowan. People always seemed to be moving up or down, not in wealth or status, but in the moral freight their lives carried. The city made room for every version of those lives.

  You can still find plenty of moral friction in Los Angeles. People still save a little vitriol for people who live those other lives. Los Angeles is still a city where a bad toupee or the wrong lipstick sets off entirely different reverberations than they would in New York. It’s still easy to glimpse here what would happen if your life went off the rails and it became a struggle to keep up appearances to the outer world.

  But it’s a different city now. It has an earnestness and a tolerance it once lacked. Everyone aspires to own a house—real estate is respectability itself—but there’s no agreement on what the lives being lived in those houses will look like. What passes for American culture has been divided and subdivided, split into hundreds of channels, and reinvented in thousands of ways. A few blocks of tract houses or turnkey mansions—it makes no difference—may turn out to contain dozens of one-family neighborhoods that agree in only one thing—the day the tras
h goes out.

  In thirty years, though, some of the underlying illusions of this place have changed very little. There’s still a profoundly American faith in the exceptionalism of the present generation. I’ve spent the past few months on the edge of one of the fastest growing counties in Southern California. Big-box malls have sprung from the earth and around them streets and streets of houses built by enormous corporations. The houses crawl over the hills and up to the edge of ravines. They roll over the desert and infringe upon the wetlands and grasslands. And yet the people who occupy them are still surprised that theirs wasn’t the last development, that the open fields a few blocks away are now only houses and more houses.

  Americans have always had one good story to tell—the next city, the next county, the next house—and no one really knows yet how to tell the new story, the one where the frontier collapses in upon itself. Perhaps one version is simply this—the respectability of the settled regions suddenly coexists with the violence, the lawlessness of the real frontier, and both change as a result. We know how that story goes when it’s told as a western. I think we’re only figuring out how it goes when it’s a fact of life being worked out as new houses cascade outward toward a final limit, where there’s no longer room or money or tolerance for more new houses.

  I like to remember the stories of that one Los Angeles relative of mine—the one who went right wing. I saw him only a few times after that transformation. There was no particular bitterness in his voice. He knew how to talk about other things. He’d come to a place where he could fit in while not fitting in. I think that was his secret. He knew that Los Angeles was no frontier for him, that it wasn’t so much a question of starting over here as of finishing out. There were plenty of open fields in the Iowa he left behind. Los Angeles was the place to forget them.

  June 6

  When it feels like time—no matter what the clock says—I walk the horses down to the night pen from the pasture where they’ve spent the day. I whistle when I open the gate. Their heads turn abruptly to the sound. I rattle the grain in the bucket, and, if they show any reluctance, Remedy begins to drive the other two horses toward me. Ida makes a feint toward the pigs in their enclosure, and they dart in circles round and round, barking and snuffling as they go. I lead the horses down the drive and into the corral, never looking back to see whether they follow or not. It’s part of the contract. They trot the last few steps and settle over their sweet feed.

  This is the fly time of year. We spray the horses, and some days they wear mesh face-masks to keep the flies off. I look out in the pasture, and there are our horses, strangely disguised as if for some long-ago game show. But nothing really keeps the flies away. On the bad days, I walk into the night pen just ahead of the horses, and the flies that envelope them suddenly envelop me. I swat them away, thinking it’s a case of mistaken identity. I’m not a horse. But at a moment like that, the distinction is academic. To the flies, I’m a horse, a particularly pale, thin-skinned, succulent one, and lacking a horse’s ability to quiver its skin in just one spot.

  In that moment, the sense of human separateness slips away. It happens again and again here on this farm. Every day, for example, I make a point of sitting on the threshold of the portable pig house hoping to make friends with two young Tamworth gilts. We’re going to breed them, and we want them as tame as they can be before then. Every day, they ease up to me a little sooner. Yesterday I could touch them on the forehead. In a month, they’ll flop on the ground to have their bellies scratched.

  There’s still an elemental distrust in their eyes. They stand broadside to where I sit, looking sideways and a little backward toward me, as if positioning themselves to breeze right past if I make a sudden move. But they turn and rub their flat wet noses against my knuckles. They glance at me and then drift away, grazing as they go. I sit and watch them, hoping to find the grain of their domesticity, the way to enlarge their trust. But I can see in the look they give me—the almost human gaze—that they’re studying me, too, waiting to discover how dependable I really am.

  June 15

  In and out we come all day long, and so do the dogs—to the pastures and the corral, to visit the ducklings and goslings in the horse trailer, to admire the new gilts in the hogpen, to feed the chickens and gather eggs. We learned early on to leave our boots in the mudroom and to check ourselves for ticks at night. We like the bats that nest in the eaves, and we don’t so much mind the chipmunks that sometimes disappear through the cracks in the foundation. We no longer really hear the sound of mice and flying squirrels in the walls at night. We all seem to live in each others’ margins.

  But the other day I found a forest tent caterpillar climbing a computer cable in my office. The creature had ridden one of us into the house. Its presence was oddly revolting, if hardly surprising. Forest tent caterpillars are everywhere this summer. I find them on the fence rails. They drown in the duck tank. Wherever the hand goes—to a gate-latch or a bucket handle—it’s sure to find a forest tent caterpillar, sometimes the tiny ones—barely an inch long, as thin as a tightly spun yarn—and sometimes the big ones—two inches long and nearly as fat as a pencil. Considered solely as a contrivance of nature, they can be quite beautiful. A line of ivory-colored keyholes runs down the back, and the sides are demurely brushed with an eye-shadow blue.

  But I rarely think of them this way, not during an outbreak as serious as this one. I brush them off my shoulders and hat and sunglasses as I mow the pastures. I shake them off the windshield wipers to keep them from being squashed against the glass. And every now and then I come upon a tree where they’ve massed on the trunk, a somber congregation of caterpillars holding themselves still along the bark while around the edges one or two twitch with the promptings of some holy fire. In such numbers, they actually look like bark, as though the surface of the tree might begin to writhe.

  I don’t know why this causes such revulsion in me. Forest tent caterpillars don’t bite, they don’t stink, they don’t carry diseases, and they aren’t personally unhandsome. It isn’t the thought of their numbers—millions and millions of them from the upper Midwest eastward—or the extensive defoliation they cause. But everywhere they go they lay down trails of silk, as though they were wiring the woods. A high wind brings the silk kiting down from the leaves, suspended in midair. To walk outdoors is to wind oneself in gossamer, as if you were being spun into one of the yellow cocoons they leave behind. I hope the poultry eat caterpillars. Some days the birds seem like our last line of defense.

  August 8

  One of the reasons I moved to the country was to try to have a more deliberate awareness of time. I imagined a tree—a sugar maple—coming into bud in spring, then leafing out and darkening into an overshadowing presence in midsummer. I imagined watching it lose its leaves in fall and somehow banking what I’d seen, as if those images would help me experience time as a continuum and not as the balking, lurching beast it so often seemed to be.

  But I had no idea how much time the country contains. I’m hip-deep in it always. I thought the seasons would come and go and that’s what I’d pay attention to. Instead, I find myself watching what the seasons leave behind, the steady accumulation of change. When we moved here, nearly eight years ago, an old honey locust loomed over the vegetable garden. Its ashes have long since been spread. The ancient crabapple on the corner has been pared back to a few stubs of branches. Nearby, a pair of white spruces are beginning to tower over me, though I planted them as whips. There are finally apples—eleven of them—on the young trees along the driveway. The posts in the rail fence beside them have just about reached the end of their useful life.

  Naturally enough, I think of myself as the still point amid all this change. My leaves never fall. If I lie fallow for a while, I’m not suddenly overcome with nettles and jewelweed and vagabond hollyhocks, like the vegetable garden. The ducks and geese molt, the horses hair up and shed, but my coat is constant.
I notice the changes in myself only when I set my hand to a familiar task. A couple of weeks ago, I stacked 354 bales in the barn loft. It was surprising how much knowledge there was in how I handled them, though there was none at all compared to the old dairy farmer who was throwing them to me.

  I’ve banked nothing, or everything. Every day the chores need doing again. Early in the morning, I clean the horsepen with a manure fork. Every morning, it feels as though it could be the day before or a year ago or a year before that. With every pass, I give the fork one final upward flick to keep the manure from falling out, and every day I remember where I learned to do that and from whom. Time all but stops. But then I dump the cart on the compost pile. I bring out the tractor and turn the pile, once every three or four days. The bucket bites and lifts, and steam comes billowing out of the heap. It’s my assurance that time is really moving forward, decomposing us all in the process.

  September 11th

  Earlier this summer, I emailed my brother a list of the animals we’re raising on this farm. I called it an inventory, but it was really a way of acknowledging that perhaps we’ve gone too far. There are now five pigs in various stages of growth and a large, comic parade of ducks and geese. There are chicks in the basement and chickens in the mulch. And there are the longtime partners in this enterprise, horses, dogs, and cats. My brother—who has three pigs and four goats—wrote back and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to know the real inventory?”

  That phrase has stuck in my head for the past few weeks. I sent my brother a list of the animals that Lindy and I are responsible for, the ones we need to feed and water every day. But I hadn’t even begun to count the creatures that are responsible for themselves. Even among those, the animals I think of first are the ones that have a direct relationship with us—the Phoebes that nest above the kitchen door, the fox that steals hens from our coop, the wild turkeys that troop into the pasture in winter, the red-tail hawks that screech overhead, driving the poultry to cover. There are others, of course—hummingbirds in the bee balm and hollyhocks, pileated woodpeckers in the deep woods, catbirds in the elderberry. But these too belong to a circle of animals that seem scaled to human powers of observation.