More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  What makes the real inventory interesting is all the rest of the organisms that live on this place. Sometimes I get a vague sense of how vast that inventory might be—nights when the crickets ring in my ears, evenings when the low sun is refracted in the wings of thousands of insects in flight over the pasture. But it’s still only a vague sense, a catalog of life forms whose numbers I have to guess at. I imagine the abundance of life here in the shape of a pyramid—the kind of illustration that might appear in a schoolbook—with a pair of humans at the peak and legions of soil bacteria at the base.

  But one of the things I’ve learned living here is that life isn’t a pyramid with humans at the peak. It’s an interrelationship far too complex to diagram so anthropocentrically and so simply. There’s a map of need here that I can’t read but that governs me as well. I go about the endless tasks, the chores, the feeding and grooming of animals, and I pretend that I’m separate and in charge. The pigs and geese remind me that that’s not exactly true. If I wrote up the real inventory, I’d have to include myself as well.

  October 7

  One of my favorite E. B. White essays is the one called “Memorandum,” written sixty-four years ago this month. I never understood it until I’d been living on this farm for a while. “Memorandum” is White’s list of the things he ought to do on his own much larger farm along the coast of Maine. The essay begins with the words “Today I should” and it ends not because White has run out of things that he should do but because it’s getting dark, and he’s spent the day typing, and his piece is already plenty long.

  What drives that essay is October. Every warm day, every day without rain or a killing frost feels like an opportunity stolen from harder weather. And in the opportunity of a warm October day—like the past week up here—you suddenly feel the pressure of the coming season. White never says it, but he’s talking in “Memorandum” about the pleasure of not doing the things that need to be done. He’s talking about resisting October—not by pretending it’s an appendix of summer but by refusing to think of it as the foreword to winter.

  I’d like to have gotten the lower pasture refenced this summer, and right now, like White, I need to take up the chicken fences and think about where the pigs will go when the ground freezes. I need to bring wood scraps from the back of the barn up to the house for kindling and get the log splitter back under cover. I could go on and on with this list, but you’re better off reading White’s. It was—as farms go—a more interesting time. And it’s pleasing to read a list of chores from sixty-four years ago. Not one of them needs doing today. My list needs doing right now.

  So why don’t I get up and do them while the weather’s good? And why didn’t White stop typing and at least “carry a forkful of straw down to the house where the pig now is?” There’s the writer’s work, for one thing. But there’s also the counterpoise of all those tasks that need doing. Starting one means not starting any of the others. It feels better to put everything off evenhandedly. The fog is low to the ground these mornings, and in the lower pasture a sugar maple that has already turned casts more light than the sun. It’s going to rain for a few days. And when the next good day comes, what needs doing here will no longer be merely a matter of should. It will be a matter of must.

  November 23

  Now that it’s winter again—wind-chill in the single digits, ice and snow on the ground—I can tell where the cold air leaks into this house. A couple of weeks ago, I began pulling apart the walls in the oldest part of the house, the mudroom and laundry room. As I worked, I felt a forensic hostility. The laundry room had been built around the washer and dryer, making it impossible to replace them without taking the room apart. So I took the room apart. I found what appears to be the oldest beam in the house—dating back to the late eighteenth century. I found miles and miles of BX electrical cable. And I found the cold spots, which I’m slowly plugging.

  The most satisfying part of all of this has been burning the house from inside. By the time I finished tearing out the laundry room, which was renovated sometime in the 1980s, there were stacks of scrap wood on the deck. I’ve enjoyed cutting them up and feeding them—nails and all—to the woodstove. The carpenter who built that room and its cupboards and closets stinted nothing when it came to lumber and nails and, especially, screws. In the evening, lengths of his handiwork crackle in the fireplace. In the morning, those dry scraps get the woodstove roaring in no time.

  Behind all that work—all that Sheetrock—there’s another house and another set of lives. When we reroofed the house a few years ago, the contractor reported that there had once been a serious chimney fire. The other day, I found its scars on a log beam hidden beneath the false ceiling in the mudroom. I wish, in fact, that the house were more articulate or that I was better at hearing what it has to say. I can hear the most recent occupants pretty clearly—they hated the thought of exposed wooden beams and brickwork. But the ones who lived here before them—all the way back to the first settlers—are nearly inaudible to me.

  I often marvel at the decisions the previous owners made. We have enough wiring hidden in the walls for a commercial office building. I wonder who will marvel at the decisions I’m making now. The trouble is that you can only see what remains—not what’s been erased. When I’m finished with my work, an era in the life of this house will have vanished, gone up in smoke. I’ll rebuild from the bones of the house outward.

  Year

  FIVE

  January 2

  I’ve learned enough about farming—or living on a farm—to begin to understand the wisdom of the old farmers I know. They’re wise because everything has already happened to them. The barn has burned down. The cows have trampled the cornfield. The combine has eaten a finger. The soybean market has gone south. If the worst hasn’t happened to one farmer, it’s happened to the neighbor down the road. A lot of the surprise has gone out of life. One of the reasons farmers like talking to my wife and me is because we still have plenty of surprise left in us.

  In my worst nightmare, all the animals have gotten out and they’re all tangled in the fence and they’re rolling in a ball down the highway. So I’ll just say this: the other day Magnus, the 300-pound Tamworth boar, got out. I looked out the attic window, and Magnus was loping after the horses in the big pasture. This is where a book like Five Acres and Independence really lets you down.

  I’d like to claim that Lindy and I got Magnus back into his pen. But it was really the horses. They can be histrionic at the most inopportune moments, but that afternoon they were creatures of good sense. Remedy, the retired cutting horse, cut left and right, agile as a cat, flaring and snorting, keeping Magnus at bay. Nell, to whom Magnus was chiefly attracted, showed us what it meant to have been raised in the wild. And Ida, the glutton, led us all back into Magnus’s pen, where there was a heap of grain on the ground. Lindy and I shut one gate behind us, opened another to let the horses out, and there we were. Order restored.

  We now give the horses their hay in the morning beside Magnus’s pen. We throw some to Magnus so he can pretend to be one of the horses. A quiet companionship has sprung up among them. Lindy says she saw Magnus batting his eyes at Nell. But when he raises his snout and starts snuffing the air, what he’s smelling is his two prospective brides living down by the barn, awaiting their nuptials. Their names are Suzanne and Cheryl.

  While I was doing the chores that night, I kept hearing Wordsworth’s phrase about emotion recollected in tranquility. That’s the wisdom of old farmers. All the whooping and cursing has died away, and the gates are latched and the lights are off and Magnus, who is as tame as tame can be, has bedded down in his hut full of hay, wondering, as I do, just what had happened that afternoon.

  January 18

  When I started gardening, I thought I’d find my way into a pattern that would repeat itself year by year. But no two years have been even remotely the same. I don’t mean the weather or the qua
ntity of rainfall. I mean just what vision I have in mind when I think about planting the vegetable garden. It nearly always begins as the same vision—something between a regal potager and a completely demotic garden allotment, the kind pictured, for instance, in Louisa Jones’s Kitchen Gardens of France. I can almost feel the kind of enclosure I want the garden to offer, and how it feels to step out of that enclosure—out from among the tomato poles and the sweet-corn stalks and into the plantations of lettuce and basil. And yet no matter what blueprint I begin with, an unintended theme seems to emerge each year. I remember a year I can only sum up as “borage.”

  The hard part isn’t choosing the seeds. Ordering seeds is like ordering fly-tying materials. Most are so cheap that you can afford a wide variety, as long as you can also solve the problem of where to plant them. For me, the hard part is resisting the architectural urges of spring, the desire to reorganize the beds, to sift the soil, to move the blueberry hedge that runs right down the middle of what could be gratifying rows of Steuben beans. I try to concentrate on two things: a simple diagram of what goes where, in already existing beds, and putting the seeds in the ground when the time is right. Somehow each year seems like a reinvention of the garden instead of a development of what came before. Perhaps it’s that way for most vegetable gardeners. Aside from the rhubarb and the sorrel and the horseradish and—God forbid—the mint, not much survives from year to year except the hope of a garden that grows more and more complex, more involuted and worldly at the same time.

  January 27

  The snow that fell a couple of days ago seems to have polarized itself as it accumulated. Some patches catch the sun and throw it back in your eyes. Other patches turn a gray face to the world, as if the light were catching them on edge. The wind no longer pokes through the ribs of the house. After a while at their hay, the horses make their way across the pasture and stand among a row of felled saplings. I’ll collect them in another month and turn them into bean-poles.

  I’ve been thinking about a hotbed that Gilbert White was making 222 years ago. A hotbed resembles a cold frame, except that the seeds are planted in a bed of slightly composted manure,which gives off heat as it composts further. The best account of how to make a hotbed comes from the ever-pungent William Cobbett, who devotes half a chapter to it in The American Gardener. Cobbett, writing a generation after White, begins by saying, “I am not about to lay down rules for persons who can afford to have cucumbers in March.” White wanted cucumbers in May, which meant making hotbeds in January. By early July, he could take apart and store the frames and sheets of glass. He also filled his hotbeds with melons, squash, and maize, which he grew mainly as an ornamental. White wasn’t the only one who loved a hotbed. Mice nested in them, and he sometimes found snake eggs in the straw.

  So what became of hotbeds? The better question is, what became of dung? How many gardeners have immediate access, as White did, to long manure (with straw and bedding mixed in) or short manure (without the straw)? We seem to be caught, in America, somewhere between the extremes of bagged compost—a finished product that gives no heat to a hotbed—and toxic oceans of liquid manure in the lagoons and holding tanks of factory farms. By White’s standards, too, we all live in hotbeds. We grow seedlings on window-sills, safe in the knowledge that there will be no “ice in chambers,” as White puts it. It’s strange to think of it this way, but in our world, electricity has replaced dung. I looked up hotbeds in one of my favorite books, Build It Better Yourself. What it showed was a cold frame with an electric heating cable snaking through the bed.

  I’m not suggesting you run out and make a hotbed. On this place, we have the straw and the horses and the dung, and I won’t be making a hotbed either. But it’s one of those practices that crystallizes the shift from White’s time to ours. What always strikes me about White and Cobbett as gardeners—what always strikes me about all good gardeners—is their ability to take care. When it comes to hotbeds, Cobbett says, in a phrase that applies to nearly the whole of the garden, “The labour is nothing, the trouble very little indeed, and all that is wanted is a small portion of care.”

  February 14

  The robins that were here a week or so ago haven’t been seen again. The ground that was softening is hard underfoot. What snow fell in the big storm was perfect for plowing. It fell dry and light, over bare ground. We were out in the pasture near dusk yesterday and came upon one of the spots where the horses had lain during the afternoon. It looked like a buffalo wallow—a dusty hollow—except that the dust was snow and there was a thin glazing of ice where the body heat of one of the horses had melted the snow. The fresh snow is like a photographic plate recording a sudden exposure. We tend to think of the tracks in the snow as narratives—after all, they’re the imprints of creatures who are going somewhere with some reason. But the tracks were so vivid yesterday that their stories seemed to vanish. What mattered wasn’t the coming and going, the prints that seemed to begin and end abruptly, with no foreword or sequel. All that mattered was the visible impression in the snow, the strokes left behind.

  Writing these words, I make it sound as though I go out into the pasture as blank as a photographic plate myself, waiting to receive impressions from the world around me. But that’s never the way it works here. What sticks with me so often is what I’ve glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. It’s the noticing I do without noticing that seems to register. And yet there are also moments like yesterday when I came upon the spot where the horses lay. It’s dumb luck. I stand beside it and think “Huh!” That’s as literate as it gets. Then the dogs move on, and the geese, seeing them, send up the alarm in the poultry yard, and a pickup comes down the road with its lights on and in the distance I can hear a freight train rumbling past. All the while I’m wondering what’s for dinner and what I’ll write tomorrow and how I’ll ease away from the concentration it takes to write a book, now that the book is out. And always there is the real issue—where will the new run-in shed go? The geese settle again and the moon comes up orange.

  February 16

  Once a week I drive south to the train station through what is still, for the most part, a farming valley. The fields along this route haven’t yet been wholly abandoned, as they have across so much of the landscape north of New York City. Farmers still spread manure on the corn-stubble in the middle of winter. And in the middle of a winter like this one, you can even see a tractor and a manure spreader sunk to the axles in mud. These are mostly conventional farms, by which I mean that they’re still dairying and raising grain in a pattern that would be familiar in Iowa, if anyone were dairying in Iowa. The difference is the quality of the soil and the scale of the operation and the size of the subsidies.

  There’s been a groundswell of unconventional farming up here. I mean small farms, usually organic, that have learned how to connect directly with consumers. It’s a new model of farming based on an old model, one my grandfather would have understood back in the days before cheap transportation—whose real costs we choose not to notice—changed the way farmers and consumers think. On the road to the train I pass the outlying fields of large dairy farms, a few of which look very well managed. The beauty of one small clover pasture in late summer astonishes me. It’s part of a rotation of pastures for a herd of Holsteins. The whole farm is beautiful, but that one pasture—never overgrazed, never undergrazed—embodies the care that goes into the place.

  Lately someone has added pigs to the landscape. Two pigs, to be precise. I round a bend, look off to the right, and there they are. One pig is a Tamworth and the other looks like a Duroc. They have a quarter-acre field to themselves, tightly fenced, and a well-built house. Seeing pigs in the landscape was a huge part of my childhood in Iowa. They were everywhere, sometimes housed in small, portable quonset huts, sometimes in farm-built A-frame sheds. The pigs I saw when I was a kid had the keys to those houses. They could come and go as they liked. What you see now is white prefab buildings full of pig
s all across the Midwest, with locked doors and feed bins and a single pickup parked outside. No pigs on the land.

  It’s been a joy to come across these pigs along the road to the train. I look for them every time. It’s not that pigs are a novelty. I’ve seen plenty of pigs at home. They’re part of the habit of our lives. I visit them across the pasture, behind the barn, below the garden, wherever we’ve moved them. The pleasure of the pigs on the road to the train is this: if I look up at the right time and the pigs are grazing in the right place, they appear to be standing on the skyline. I often see Holsteins along a pasture ridge with nothing but blue sky behind them. There’s hilarity and solid comfort in the sight of those pigs on the horizon. I don’t know why.

  March 1

  Some days I suspect that the objects around me are aging faster than I am. I put on a jacket to do chores and realize that I bought it in 1987. Here’s a fly rod I made in 1981. In the stairwell hangs the mounted head of a mule deer my dad shot in Colorado a couple of years before I was born. The ears are coming apart at the edges, though the glass eyes are as bright as ever. They’ve been looking at me since I was an infant. How did these things get to be so old?

  But nothing meters the passing of time like paperback books. I began buying them when I was in high school. I kept a small stack of them—Twain, Faulkner, way too much Aldous Huxley—beside the clock radio on my bedside table. I bought each book with much consideration, and each one felt like another stone in the raising of a free-form house. I’d grown up on public libraries, but cheap paperbacks made it possible to have a library of my own.