More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  The end doors stay open for a few weeks until the hay has dried completely. The newness of the barn vanishes when the loft is full of hay, because the hay itself feels so old, even though it came out of the fields only a day or two earlier. What’s old about it is the way it leads right back to my childhood and beyond. And yet every year I’m surprised again at how new the hay stays. Those last six bales? The ends of one or two of them were bleached by the sun, and they all had a spidery feel to them, as if they’d been bound with silk instead of twine. But the loft kept them dry and well aired, and when I fed them out in flakes for the horses, we were all pleased to see how the summer inside them had lasted.

  September 12

  My dad called the other night to tell me that my cousin Myron had died of a heart attack. I was in upstate New York, and my dad was in the San Joaquin Valley. Myron was at the Clay County Fair in Spencer, Iowa, when he collapsed and died. He had turned 61 in August. I last saw Myron a little more than a year ago. My uncle’s steers had broken down a section of fence, and we all went out into the night to herd them in and fix the spot where they escaped. Myron has been seven years ahead of me all my life, which means he always seemed like one of the grown-ups. It felt the same way that night. Myron was helping. I was conscious of helping. There’s a world of difference between those two things.

  I seem, to my own surprise now this late in life, to have grown up in a world full of men I admired without knowing how to admire them. They lived near the home farm in northwest Iowa, and we lived in a small town a hundred miles away. What we had in common was that home farm, where I spent parts of several summers, and also the Sunday and holiday dinners my grandparents hosted, where the common language was pinochle. I thought at the time that Myron was shy and untalkative—a tall young man with a big smile and a red face, clearly a part of the grown-up world. He ran the corn-sheller, the most dangerous piece of machinery I’d ever seen. But what does any eighteen-year-old have to say to an eleven-year-old, especially when one has grown up farming and the other has grown up reading books?

  I thought of this at the edge of a bean field talking to Myron and his younger brothers a couple of years ago. We were talking about the genetically modified crops growing all around us. Myron invited me to come out for bean picking one autumn and run the combine. He knew how that would impress someone who is still, essentially, a town kid. I wish I’d taken him up on it.

  But there’s something I wish even more. It turned out that Myron wasn’t the least bit untalkative. The night we rounded up the steers I’d already listened—happily—to an evening-long monologue of his. It was about nothing, but it was also about all the kinships of land and family and commerce in the country around us. One name led to another, one place to another, in the present and the past. The real measure of how empty the countryside is depends on who is doing the telling. To hear Myron tell it, we were having cake and coffee in the midst of a richly peopled land. I’ve been looking forward to hearing the rest of the story ever since.

  October 14

  For the most part our animals don’t have many secrets from us. The reverse is probably true too, except for the one big secret we keep from the pigs. The horses and poultry are always in sight, and together we all belong to something that’s larger than any one of us—the daily routine of this small farm. Morning and evening I can feel the animals leaning toward what they know comes next—a walk down to the barn, hay and grain, layer-mash, egg gathering and the filling of water tanks. The livestock clocks in and out as surely as I do. I can always feel the weight of their scrupulous attention.

  But sometimes I take the animals by surprise. I catch them without expectation and witness how deeply they reside here. It happened the other noon. We awoke to the first frost of autumn, a clear bright day that had not lost its chill when I walked down to the end of the driveway to get the mail. In the big pasture—all of an acre—the horses stood rigid, broadside to the sun. The ducks and geese lay sound asleep in the threadbare shade of a hickory that had hastened to lose its leaves. Some hens had sprawled in a dust-bath, and there was a subcommittee meeting going on in the entrance to the portable chicken house.

  Here I was, cutting my narrow vulpine arc to the mailbox and back, and all around me life seemed to have stopped. We think of time as an abstraction, an equation, a cold transparent thing without substance. But here, in this mid-day pause, time seemed to be giving off as much warmth as the sun itself. The horses were basking in the heat of the sun, keeping themselves perpendicular to its rays. But they were also basking in what I can’t help calling their continuity, their presence in the long, floating, unscheduled middle part of the day. Nothing about their manner suggested that this was a private moment, partly because I find it easier to believe in a horse’s sense of justice than its sense of privacy. And yet I felt that I was looking into a private moment.

  The reason is simple. Whenever my life intersects with theirs, it’s all expectation, a concern for what comes next. Among the animals, I feel as though I carry time like a bacillus, and we share the infection. But in the middle of the day, equidistant from morning and evening chores, the animals drift away into a life all their own. But if I stepped into the pasture, hoping to still my own clock, to pause in the sun, the horses would wander over—and the chickens would rush my way—as if to ask, “What now?”

  November 10

  By now, the wind has emptied the milkweed pods. The goldenrod has gone mousy. All the leaves are down, except for a few tenacious oaks and beeches and an ornamental dogwood that’s a reprise of the entire season. Each tree looks more solitary—and the woods more intimate—in this bare month than in the thickness of summer. The memory of October seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November. The sumacs down by the road might have been reading Swinburne the way they caught fire and expired, vaingloriously, in the light of last month. But now that drama is over, as if the year had come up against a plain, Puritan truth and was the better for it.

  I used to hate November up here—a month of freezing rain and inconclusive light. It brought out my most urban sentiments, a reluctant longing for the enclosure of the city, its containment and warmth and distraction and all those lights. Up here we’re no more vulnerable to the prevailing wind now than we were in August, when the trees still had leaves, but that’s not how it feels. I still can’t get over the size of the November night. And yet my old disgust with the month is somehow slipping away.

  I suppose this is partly the snobbery of place. October’s vivid colors are a public spectacle. You can take them in even through the tinted windows of a chartered coach lumbering down the road. You can track the peak of the foliage as though it were just another commodity fluctuating in price. But nobody really chronicles when the lights go out in the goldenrod or when, all at once, the most luminous color in the landscape becomes the green of the moss on the ledge outcrops in the woods. These are private gratifications, the kind that come not from passing by but from staying put.

  I’ve been replacing fence up here this fall, and the other morning I walked along the western property line, where the next stretch of new fence will go. This is the edge of the hemlock woods, where the ground is either bedrock or fungus. A few yards further in, there’s a gorge with an intermittent stream. Most of the time the water goes underground well above our land, leaving the rockfall dry, but after heavy rains the gorge sometimes flows with the sound of a heavy wind. That morning was one of those times. In that somber place, as dark and deep as the month we’re in, a stream was now rushing, not in flood, perilously, but working its way down the rocks, carrying the broken light of the sky with it. Another day or two, and the gorge will be dry again.

  December 22

  The heavy winds that blew through the Northeast a couple of weeks ago mostly missed our place. They took only the dead boughs, which now lie scattered along the edges of the pastures like porous old bones. The farmers up here w
ill have a lot of cleaning to do along the fence lines before they make hay next June or they’ll be baling kindling. In the woods across from our house, the wind snapped off the top of a sugar maple. The crown lies jagged on the ground, not yet weighed down by gravity or moss. It exaggerates the disorder of nature, which seems so apparent in the absence of snow this time of year.

  Nearly every image of nature I’ve ever come across misses the sense of intricate confusion underfoot in the woods, the thickets of goldenrod collapsing into each other along the roadsides, the rotting tusks of fallen beeches broken against the western hillside. It almost never makes sense to talk about the purpose of nature. But until the snow comes I could easily imagine that the purpose of nature is to create edges, because every edge, no matter how small, is a new habitation. As purposes go, that could hardly be more different from my own, which is to reduce the number of edges here so that the big pasture is bounded by four clean lines only, free of interruptions from sumac or knotweed or shattered maple limbs. Left to itself nature is all interruption.

  These are the thoughts that crowd around during the shortest days of the year, when the sky is the color of flint and the sun, when it appears, seems to have lost its candlepower. Even the feeling of dormancy—a harvest of rest—is incomplete without snow. But disorder is as much in the mind as order. I drive across the county, brooding on confusion, and come upon a towering single oak—stripped of leaves but still symmetrical—mocking the sawmill that lies across the road. The sight of that one tree is enough to banish sorrow.

  Interlude

  September 18

  If you walk to the edge of a small Iowa town in mid-August, now or in the days when I was a child there, you come to a wall of corn or a low, continuous border of soybeans that reaches as far as the horizon. Town ends and country begins just that quickly, and the nature of country in central Iowa is so extremely orderly—the crop rows so meticulously laid out, weeds so thoroughly discouraged—that the edge of town always looks a little disorganized. Whatever else an Iowa town may be, it’s only a clearing in the corn.

  I lived in small Iowa towns from 1954 until 1966, when my family moved to California, as so many Iowans did in those days. Those years, and the years immediately after, reaching into the mid-1980s, brought a sea change in American agriculture. My mother’s side of the family once farmed, and my father’s side still does in the northwest corner of the state. The little I knew about farming when I was a boy I learned from my father’s brothers and my cousins, though for me farming meant teasing the animals and pretending to drive the tractor and climbing in the barn. The thought that farming was really an economic activity—something done for money, with far-reaching social and environmental implications—never crossed my mind. I was surrounded, even in town, by the economy of farming, but it was a little like Iowa’s summer humidity—I noticed none of it. To this day, farm-town banks still post corn and bean prices along with the temperature and time on outdoor electric signs.

  It would never have occurred to me to call what I saw in the fields outside town “conventional” agriculture. No one else I knew, young or old, would have called it that either. It was just agriculture. My grandfather, in Lyon County, had been something of a pioneering farmer, one of the first to buy a tractor, one of the first to experiment with hybrid seed and the new postwar chemical fertilizers. His sons and their sons followed his example. If I’d been asked to choose an adjective to describe the agriculture I saw around me, it would have been “progressive,” a word that’s an advertisement not a description.

  In 1985 I began a book about the farming life called Making Hay. After nearly twenty years away, I returned to my uncles’ and cousins’ farms in northwest Iowa and spent part of June helping them cut and dry and bale alfalfa. That, I now think, is a little like going to an auto factory and studying how the cafeteria works. Alfalfa is a marginal crop in Iowa, where dairying has disappeared and cash grain is king. Unlike corn and soybeans, alfalfa usually stays in the ground for three years. It increases the amount of nitrogen available in the soil. (Soybeans do this too.) To me, there’s something beautiful about the act of making hay. It never occurred to me to wonder, while I was writing my book, what role hay played in the broader agricultural economy of the state. It is, in most senses, a nostalgic crop.

  Making Hay was for me a last look at a seemingly unspoiled landscape, the last time I’d be able to see the stern farms of Iowa without seeing the broad economic connections that underlay the patchwork of the fields, without questioning the agricultural practices common throughout the state, without knowing that this was “conventional” agriculture. While writing Making Hay, I noticed that the houses and outbuildings on farmstead after farmstead had been pulled down and plowed under to make more room for crops. The small towns I once lived in had dwindled in ways that were confusing, saddening. Those facts were inescapable. But I hadn’t figured out how to ask the critical questions that would explain what I was seeing, nor did I conceive that there was an alternative to it. I grew up in farm country but I knew no more about it than most Americans do.

  In the early decades of this century, not long after the Midwestern prairie soil was first turned by a plow, the miracle of American farming was a natural miracle, the result of the soil’s preposterous depth and fertility, itself the result of centuries of tallgrass prairie being grazed by bison herds and burned by fire. But in the decades after I first came to know my grandfather’s farm—the sixties through the eighties—that miracle was beginning to be called by another name, because it had become a different miracle. It was now a technological miracle, an industrial miracle, the result of the wizardry of plant breeders and chemists and engineers and financiers.

  The expectations of farming changed. From the usda all the way down to the local banker, experts advised farmers to tear down their fences, do away with their livestock, and plant from roadside to roadside. Farmers were told to borrow against the speculative value of their land and expand their operations by buying more land and purchasing more products they couldn’t make themselves—fertilizer, pesticides, machinery. Production became the sole measure of a progressive farmer. The only way to survive, farmers were told, was to get bigger, and the only way to get bigger was to accrue debt. And buy out your neighbors.

  But it hasn’t taken long for that kind of agricultural progress to bite the hands that feed us, and not only in harsh years. Bad news has been drifting in from the countryside for the last four or five decades. As remarkable as conventional farming’s yields and profits have been, the list of its systemic side effects is tragic: farm foreclosures, rural bank failures, wells tainted by agricultural chemicals leaching into groundwater, pollution of surface water, the steady loss of soil and deterioration of its quality, an undiminishing rate of crop damage to pests despite heavy use of pesticides, a collapse of genetic diversity among agricultural crops and animals, a health crisis among agricultural laborers, the increasing corporate control of all levels of agricultural production, the increasing absentee and corporate ownership of agricultural land, the economic and social marginalizing of farmers and their communities, a burdensome agricultural bureaucracy, a perplexing and often wrong-headed program of federal farm subsidies.

  You don’t need to be a pessimist to be depressed by the widespread disappearance of small farms or the concentration of agricultural land in the hands of corporations and the demise of farm towns all across the country. Nor is it unpatriotic to ask what the ultimate cost of this kind of agriculture may really be. It’s been clear for some time now, in nearly every corner of this country, that the dynamic commercial success of conventional agriculture—a success only for certain sectors of the population and only in certain years—has been brought about by consuming natural resources—topsoil, water, petroleum, people—as if they were purchasable inputs. Sometimes you hear it said, with pride, that it takes just 2 percent of Americans to feed this nation. That’s good news only i
f you believe that having few farmers is better than having many farmers, or that there’s something demeaning in farm work or in rural living.

  But if what farmers know, as well as what they do, matters, then you can’t have too many farmers. And if it’s how farmers act that matters, then clearly there can never be enough farmers. Yet the thrust of conventional agriculture has been to drive farmers from the land, to depopulate the countryside, and to turn many of the farmers that remain into nothing more than contract laborers and heavy-equipment operators. The way we farm has divorced farmers utterly from the soil. Society and the soil suffer alike.

  As an index to what’s possible, it’s worth remembering that modern, chemically intensive industrial agriculture has only existed since the end of World War II. But it’s also good to keep in mind the words of Allan Savory, creator of an influential decision-making model widely used among ranchers and rangeland managers. “Throughout history,” Savory has said, “civilizations have collapsed because they outgrew their environmental resources. There’s no reason to believe that our civilization is an exception. We could have sustainable agriculture tomorrow if we abandon the cities. That we will obviously not do. What we need is sustainable civilization.”

  September 5

  When I first heard that Vicki Hearne had died, I reread Adam’s Task, which was published in 1986. I remember how strange the book felt to me when it first appeared, how odd it seemed to talk about dog training and horse training in a language full of allusions to Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, to Milton and Stanley Cavell. I realize now that I’d read Adam’s Task backwards. To me, it sounded like the elaborate and unnecessary cloaking of a simple subject—animal training—with the rigorous dialects of poetry and philosophy. It read, in other words, like a serious philosophical discussion of the linguistic acts of naming and command, mingled with strangely hyperbolic assertions about the capacity of animals for moral thought. But at the time the only thing I’d ever studied was language.