More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Parkman was not yet twenty-three, and he carried with him a large quiver of judgments, all of them sharp edged and many utterly wrong. Most of them he eventually set aside, becoming in time one of America’s greatest historians. We listened to him not for his prejudices but for his powers of observation, his ability to translate the freshness of the prairie in language that still sounds newly felt. I looked beyond the fence lines crowded with tumbleweed and thought about a sentence of Parkman’s, something he says after an unnamed Indian looks at a vacated campsite and names the men who stopped there. “By what instinct he had arrived at such accurate conclusions,” Parkman writes, “I am utterly at a loss to divine.”

  The real question is why Parkman chalked up the careful observations of a different mind to instinct. It was a way of asserting primacy, of assuming that that Indian knew what he knew without knowing how. That passage marks a seam between two cultures, a profound gulf between Parkman and his Native American compatriot. The more I thought about Parkman’s words and our trip west, the more I began to feel as though we were driving along a seam of our own, across a landscape of vanished knowledge, secure in a cultural instinct that was coming, year by year, to seem more and more insecure. Around Victorville, we were brought to a dead halt by the snows of San Bernardino county.

  February 15

  The other night there was thunder along the lower flanks of the San Gabriel mountains. It began just before dark, and at first I didn’t recognize what I was hearing. I thought it was the sound of Thursday night—the rumble of heavy plastic trash dumpsters, a whole street of them, being wheeled out to the curb. The rain came and went and came again, throwing the scent of eucalyptus and dust into the twilight, the scent of this dry California winter. We watched the lightning—quick as a lizard’s tongue—from a plastic picnic table at Juanita’s, a taqueria near the San Bernardino Freeway. If you were driving past Juanita’s in a hurry, you might almost mistake it for a bail-bond shop, except that bondsmen are partial to neon and don’t wear hairnets at work.

  We’re living farther down the alluvial skirts of the San Gabriels than we did when we were here two years ago. In fact, we live in what tract housing looked like half a century ago—uniform houses, stucco-clad, whose only homage to their location is small windows on the south side, where the desert sun lives. Across the street, a perfectly graceless little two-bedroom, one bath has been marked down to $465,000. This was jackrabbit country once, and now it’s full of jackrabbit houses. At 7:50 a.m., all the cars back out of all the driveways at once. You can feel the haste—see someone dash from the house to the passenger door even as the car begins to roll backwards out of the garage. I’m sure the same thing goes on in the ochre mansions higher up the mountain, where every now and then a cougar steals a Doberman from its own backyard. Everyone can feel the freeway beckoning.

  What I find myself looking for here in Los Angeles is a sense of dislocation. And what I’ve come to realize is how closely dislocation and a sense of the ordinary are linked. I find myself watching instead for the pattern of ordinary life, which is all the more moving to me here because I don’t understand its rhythms. I listen to band practice in the neighborhood park. I admire the profusion of baseball gloves in the local sporting goods store, a reminder that the amateur season is well under way here. I watch a young father in scrubs and his soccer-playing daughter waiting in line at the local burrito place, and I wonder what it’s like to grow up taking good carne asada for granted. I try to see how people’s lives are shaped, how they construct what seems normal to them, and whenever I get a glimpse of it, I find all the dislocation I could ever want. It’s like standing on a strange lawn in the dark watching the glow of a television on the living-room ceiling.

  We go exploring along the boulevards, up La Brea, down Pico, over on Wilshire. All the business is on the boulevards and so are all the landmarks. But what always catches my eye is the side streets, which yawn open for an instant left and right and then close again, like gaps between the rows in a field of corn. A glimpse is all we allow ourselves—a double row of trees shading a quiet street, houses moated by lawn and landscaping. And yet looking into the crevice of each side street is like looking into a separate decade. I wonder what I’d know if I lived there, and what I’d take for granted.

  We, in turn, have cobbled together a temporary life here, so different from life in the country at home. I bicycle up the alluvial grade to teach, and when office hours are over, I coast all the way back, across the Metrolink tracks and down onto the jackrabbit flats. The dogs, who are used to a pasture, stare transfixed at the squirrels on the power lines overhead, and they woof mournfully through the chain-link at a cat standing two houses away. The morning we arrived, I brushed against a glossy shrub at the edge of the driveway. A tart oily scent clung to my hands. It took me half a day to place the smell. It was rosemary—not a sprig of it but whole, in the bush and about to bloom. It’s not as if I’d forgotten the smell of rosemary—lost the memory of it somewhere on the trip west. What I’d forgotten is the difference between familiar and unfamiliar, expected and unexpected, out here where the herbs grow wild and thunder sounds like solid citizens taking the trash out to the curb.

  March 12

  I’m sitting on the front porch of my father’s house in a small town in the heart of California’s almond country. It will be eighty degrees today. I’ve been watching the park across the street for hours. I can hear the delayed irregular heartbeat of a basketball game on the far side, all the slap gone out of the ball at this distance. A young boy pedals his bicycle across the lawn, and I suddenly remember how reluctant a bicycle feels on grass, how hard it is to urge it forward. A girl—just barely a teenager—walks to the diamond to practice softball with her father. On the way, she walks a dozen feet behind him. On the way home, she walks half a block ahead. He’s a terrible pitcher.

  The horizon across the park is a line of cement tile rooftops. Beyond them, the almond groves begin, invisible from here but discernible nonetheless. Everything would feel different if those almond groves weren’t there, if the houses went on and on, as they tend to do in this state. The houses across the park, now a decade old, would be nearly identical if they weren’t so intently un-uniform, gables here, a mansard roof there, and front doors in every degree of involution. This is a quiet neighborhood in a quiet town. Every now and then a car passes—nearly always an SUV roaring like a jet—and a garage door opens automatically and the SUV is ingested after spilling the children onto the driveway: a boy with a bat, a girl with a jump rope, a younger sister with a pink baseball glove.

  Toward sunset, my dad and I go for a drive west of town, into the glare of the sun, which is lying just above the tops of the evenly pruned orchards. On the way to the country, we pass through the new part of town, the rich part, where the houses are nearly new, monuments of encrustation. They look like fortresses facing each other across the street or like something you might find on the turquoise gravel of a starter aquarium next to a treasure chest sending up a stream of bubbles. The front yard has vanished in this neighborhood. Instead there’s a paved forecourt for automobiles and a hangar-size garage. It’s as if the vehicles that occupy these driveways had decided to build very nice living quarters for the people who operate them.

  Where the houses stop, the orchards begin. The almonds are just past full blossom and beginning to drop their petals. I always drive through these orchards with a sense of wonder. The whole world has been ruled into lines of perspective. These aren’t tall trees, and the almond branches converge well before they reach the horizon, which creates the illusion that the orchards are endless. I never drive past them without wanting to stop the car and walk down the long swaths of grass that lie between the trees, into an infinite checkerboard of light and shade and blossom. The trees have been planted with industrial precision but the effect is completely aesthetic, as if these were groves in a pleasure garden.

  A Coop
er’s Hawk detaches himself on the wing from a high bough and drifts into the orchard a few feet above the ground. He stays with us, gliding through row after row of trees, eclipsing himself until he vanishes from sight. At crossroads, we come upon old farmhouses—and sometimes a very new one—almost hidden in the orchards, broken shade all the way up to the back porch. We pass a family playing baseball in a pasture. It’s a treacherous game there, every grounder a bad hop.

  And then the orchards end in piles of boughs and overturned stumps. The trees have been toppled and the good firewood cut out and hauled away. It’s hard to say whether the trees had lived out their productive lives or whether the land had been sold for houses. We pass mountains of almond hulls and a paper mill and a steel-fabricating plant and a processing plant for eggs. We turn back into the old heart of town and cross over the spine of the Central Valley—Highway 99—and drive back to my dad’s house.

  All day long there has been only one question on my mind. The day seems almost perfectly still, but it’s a stillness against the backdrop of steady, intensifying change. What’s it like to grow up—to live—in the midst of such constant, radical alteration? What effect does it have on how you think of the future? It is, I suppose, all part of a succession. The native grassland gives way to orchards, and the orchards give way to houses, and I can’t stop myself wondering what the houses will give way to.

  April 9

  Last week I read with my students an essay by Lewis Thomas called “On Medicine and the Bomb,” which was first published in 1981. It’s been a long time since I taught that essay, and a lot has changed since Thomas wrote it, including the structure of global politics and most of the numbers he uses. It’s a simple essay. Thomas surveys the state of research and practice in several medical fields, including bone marrow transplants, burn therapy, and the treatment of what he calls “overwhelming trauma.” And then he considers the good of all these resources against the prospect of a nuclear missile falling on New York City or Moscow. Which is to say no good at all.

  This is a useful essay for young writers. It reminds them of the importance of dwelling wholly in each sentence they make. It teaches them to trust the reader. Thomas never peers around the corner of the next paragraph. He never hints where he’s going. His prose is plain. He never exaggerates. He presents facts, one by one, about medical research and technology. But reading the essay is like watching a great magician perform a simple card trick. One card, two cards, three cards, four cards, none of them out of the ordinary. Then he lays down the last card, and it’s the one you’ve been having nightmares about your entire life.

  My entire life, I should say. I asked my students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, whether they’d grown up with any fear of nuclear holocaust. The answer was no. My students are so very old that I forget how young they are. The youngest were born in 1988. If they came to some embryonic political awareness about the same age I did—I was eleven when Kennedy was killed—then it happened about 1999. We finished with Thomas and moved on to other things. But I went home in the California night feeling as though I were carrying a precious relic of memory inside me.

  The answer my students gave—that unhesitating “no”—brought to mind a few of the landmarks of my own nuclear fears. They include Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, Peter Watkins’s The War Game, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, to which you might now add Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I remember—and it seems very strange to have to “remember”—the way these books and films seemed to stimulate and desolate me, the way they led me to a point I always had to turn away from, and sooner rather than later. The problem wasn’t trying to imagine the unimaginable. The problem was trying to realize that the unimaginable had been carefully planned, as Thomas says, by “so many people with the outward appearance of steadiness and authority.”

  It occurred to us that night that Lewis’s essay could be rewritten about global warming. You could show the extent to which we’re prepared to make the drastic changes needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, survey the technology that would allow us to hold back the rising oceans or cope with increasingly violent storms or provide us with alternative sources of energy. And you would conclude that we haven’t even begun to prepare for the forthcoming changes. You could argue, as Thomas does, that “we need, in a hurry, some professionals who can tell us what has gone wrong in the minds of statesmen in this generation.”

  Except that climate change isn’t just about statesmen, about the men with secret access codes and red telephones on their desks. It’s about all of us, in every choice we make every day. I had the unspeakable luxury to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was possible to believe in the otherness of the nuclear insanity that threatened the world. I look at my students and realize that they’re in the first generation to grow up knowing that there is no otherness to the insanity that threatens us now. The insanity is what we call normal, and it’s all our own. There’s a good chance that my students are better prepared for this than I am, because they’ve never been allowed to believe that the problem of climate change is only a matter of politics at the highest level. They know it’s their problem, too.

  We got this far in our seminar that night, possessed by the quiet outrage that Thomas expresses and a little puzzled by the different burdens our generations seem to have assumed. And what I added is that the nuclear arsenal Thomas was talking about still exists. The numbers have changed and so has the global politics, but the weapons still stand, waiting. The capacity to handle radiation sickness and burns and trauma has grown since 1981, but so has the number and concentration of potential victims. What it comes down to, in Thomas’s words, is this. “Get a computer running somewhere in a cave, to estimate the likely number of the lucky dead.” This is a fear my students will have to grow into.

  May 18

  I’m writing from a mile high in a small Wyoming town on the edge of the Wind River range. The snow on the nearby buttes has finally melted, and the creek-bottoms and pastures and hayground are an unhoped-for green. The drift of cotton from the cottonwoods is almost over, but the lilacs are still in high bloom. The town is nearly damp with their scent. It’s two scents really, a floral dissonance, a sweet astringency. There’s a dark, grating baritone of sorts, which is veiled by a lighter, more liquid perfume, a second soprano I suppose. I find myself wondering how a scent so strangely unsettled can also feel so homely.

  We’re driving across country, heading home from Southern California. It didn’t occur to me until this drive how segregated the botanical scents of Southern California really are. You come upon them in pockets—a planting of this, a gathering of that, upwellings of sage and jasmine and orange blossom and rosemary. But half a block down the street the fragrance has faded or been overlaid, or it’s simply surrendered to the ozone. By late afternoon our first day on the road, we were a little short of Cedar City, Utah. We stopped to switch drivers, and when I stepped out of the truck the breeze was suddenly full of the fragrance of unhardened grasses, an entire landscape of gramineous scent. The desert was long behind us—the Joshua trees and flowering yucca—and so was everything that Southern California calls to mind. But it took that smell on the wind to make me know it.

  We had to climb higher still before we came upon the lilacs. We caught up to them in Coalville, Utah, up near the southwest corner of Wyoming. They were growing in every yard along the gravel street on the edge of town, just as they do in the town I’m writing from. By the time we get home the lilacs will have long since gone by. When we first bought our small farm, now nearly ten years ago, I spent part of one summer trying to grub them out. They seemed so ordinary, so deeply familiar. It says almost enough about where I was raised to say that I was raised among lilacs.

  Here, in the scent of them, I can smell the spareness of a cold climate, the beautiful austerity of a short growing season. In its own way, a
lilac is as pushing, as immodest as anything that grows in Southern California. Just ask the person who has tried to grub one out. But when I smell lilacs, I see a nearly bare yard in a small town and children playing in the weight of their scent not knowing what it will come to mean to them in time.

  May 25

  The tires whine and sometimes they moan. Sometimes they send up a whistle I don’t even hear until it stops. Now and then the asphalt runs smooth and true. But mostly the interstate is a series of unpredictable discontinuities—a sharp thump at a shallow overpass, a few miles partly paved with recycled rubber, a long sequence in western Nebraska where the tires make the sound of the special effects in Walter Mitty’s mind. And then there’s Omaha, a dozen heavily corrugated miles that must drive truckers insane.

  In imagination, Interstate 80 is a single line, the shortest practical distance between San Francisco and New York. To be at any one point on that line is to feel the length of the whole, as if the only here that matters is the here you come upon when you’re finally there. I watch the landscape zoom past and forget that we’re the ones zooming along while the landscape stays perfectly still. We come to the Nebraska grasslands. A windmill is pumping water into a stock tank surrounded by cattle. The grass is bent low. These are reminders that the wind is more than just the breeze of our passing, the bucking windstorm that follows a semi. This is a native wind, quartering down stiffly out of the northwest. This is the wind that everyone who lives here learns to live with.

  Whenever I drive across country, I carry a single question with me, and I ask it over and over again: Could I live here? It’s natural enough, I suppose—a central question for a species whose habitat is so broad, defined as much by imagination and emotion as it is by strict biological constraints. It’s a question that raises the matter of time as much as place. Cutting across central Wyoming, I look up a draw and see a sheltered spot under the hills where the sagebrush breaks into grass, and I think, “I could live there.” And I could, now, because living anywhere has been made so easy in our time. It’s no longer a problem of physical limits—how far you have to haul water and salt and flour, how long you can go without company.