But what I’m really asking when I wonder “Could I live here?” is “Who would I be if I lived here?” To that question I never know the answer. Some places seem obviously unlivable, like Jeffrey City, a nearly abandoned Wyoming town that sprang up during a uranium boom and died a couple of decades later. The answer is no along the southern fringe of Cheyenne, where a new Jeffrey City is being built, thanks to the petroleum boom that has turned the state upside down.
But when I ask, “Could I live here?” I usually get a more equivocal answer, and it’s the uncertainty that sets me thinking. I see an abandoned farmhouse on the high plains, a broken-down corral, the ruins of a few old cottonwoods, and I can imagine hearing the notes of a meadowlark being carried on the wind as I go to work on the place. This is an experiment in relativity. I’m the observer traveling along the interstate at 75 mph, and I can’t allow myself to imagine living anywhere I can see from my current position. But what if it were a place just like this and over the horizon?
Perhaps this is a mental game everyone plays—a way to test the life you’re actually living. You drive through a small town at night and wonder what it would be like to feel at home in one of those houses where only the bedroom lamp is still shining. You wonder what your own life would look like if you could stand outside it as a stranger. But what this question always confirms in me is something I must have understood when my wife and I decided to settle on a small farm in the country. Driving across America, I see place after place I can happily imagine living. And what I notice is that they’re mostly uninhabited places.
So Nebraska comes to an end, and the next day we drive into Iowa, where I’ve already lived a good part of my life. It’s been raining since dawn, and now the wind is pounding down from the north. There’s water standing in every row on the hillside fields, and it’s begun to cut across the rows and run down to the creeks and rivers, carrying Iowa away to the Gulf of Mexico. Two more days on the road, and we’ll be back in the place where I no longer wonder if I could live there because it’s the place I live.
June 1
Seven years ago, I planted a pair of white spruces—Picea glauca. They came by mail in slender tubes from a nursery in Oregon, mere wisps of vegetation. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to put them, so I stuck them in the ground in an improvised nursery bed, beside the sweet corn and the pole beans. A year later I planted them just inside the fence along the gravel road that runs past the house. It has been to their liking. By late summer, the new growth hardens off to an immortal green, but this time of year it’s still soft and drooping and pale. Those trees are now well over ten feet tall—lone emissaries, in a sense, from the great forest of white spruces that reaches across Canada.
There’s always an assumption of selflessness in planting a tree. You’re supposed to think, while digging the hole, how far into the future the tree will grow and what shallow, unconvincing weeds we humans are in comparison. Standing by the young sprout, you’re supposed to wonder who will see this tree when it’s full-grown, and you’re bound in duty to consider the serenity of your own grave. It’s true that I’d like to see these spruces in another eighty years. But I can take in the whole tree now. I can watch the growing tip—so wan in early June—gradually turn into trunk. I can still remember that I planted these spruces myself. When they’re fully mature, they’ll seem to have planted themselves, as mature trees nearly always do.
The rest of the garden grows much faster, of course. The peas and beans shoot up and so will the tomatoes and corn. But every year the vegetables get to be just so tall, just so ripe, and then down they come with the harvest, the frost. I know their limits as well as they do. I’m not going to be staggered by a patch of corn that turns out to be thirty feet tall. The garden will tell me soon enough where the summer went.
But I’m staggered by these spruces nearly every day. I see a great deal of their growing time, because they’re growing in full view of my office window. Again and again I go out to stand beside them, to measure their height against my own. It shouldn’t be possible for them to sneak up on me, and yet every year they do. I began asking, “How did they get so tall?” when they were only waist-high. I’m still asking now that they’re beginning to dwarf me. I’d like to say that slow has turned sudden in these spruces, because we imagine a stoicism in the way trees grow. But I’ve been a close witness of their vegetative life, and in my mind I can’t keep up with it.
July 2
The barn will never be clean. It has a dirt floor, and hay is always sifting down from the loft. Swallows have nested over the light fixtures and the chipmunks are everywhere and someone has dug a proud hole under the wall near the horse tank. Clean I cannot make it, but I can recover some territory. I’m not a real farmer, but I have a real farmer’s hoarding instinct—the sure belief that the thing I’m about to throw out will be just the thing I need down the road. Right now I’m trying to keep myself from throwing out a rubber feed pan one of the horses has pawed a hole through. I have no idea what I’d ever use it for, but that isn’t really the point. It isn’t a matter of knowing, looking forward. It’s a matter of not regretting, looking back.
What I regret right now is all this junk, and so I’m cleaning the barn. In practice, this means allowing myself to feel a sudden hatred for objects I’ve been moving around for years. I spend the day muttering. I tear apart an old tool bench I’ve loathed all this time. I throw out the last of the previous owner’s electric waterers and the eight-foot yard hydrant with the bend in the middle and the plastic tarps full of holes. I see the limits of my character and, in a sense, the limits of my life. I love the gratification of fixing what’s broken, but it takes a certain kind of breaking for me to be able to do any good. I’m never going to be able to weld in a hay barn.
I stop sometimes to watch the swallows fly through the barn or to admire the fact that all the wrenches are now in one place. I pretend that I’ll know in a week where I put everything today. I admire the dried up litter of immature mice I found in a drawer. And I finally admit to myself that a half-decomposed box of books that has lived in the barn for a decade has lost its place in civilization. So I load the books one by one—Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Frye’s The Great Code, even my old copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time—into the tractor bucket along with a great wad of used baling twine. The burn pile or the dumpster? That’s an easy question. The books flutter down from the bucket onto an old hayrack on the floor of the dumpster. I wonder if I’ll have to answer for this someday.
July 26
Here’s how things stand at midsummer. One of the Tamworth pigs is tame enough to be scratched behind the ears. The other isn’t. They’re going through a hundred pounds of feed every three or four days. Two of the white geese have clubbed together and banished the third white goose from their society. The lame Ancona duck has taken refuge under the old chicken house. We’d put her out of her misery, except that her misery is her life. The old Dominique rooster seems to be in a vertiginous state, always leaning and nearly always dozing. During the listless heat of the day, the chickens lie in the dust beneath the pickup truck. The horses stand in the hickory shade, incognito in fly masks, tails flicking.
The vegetable garden has gone feral. The walking onions, the chives and the blueberries are the only signs of cultivation there. The less said about that the better. Hopes are high for next year. The crop of chipmunks is incredible. There have never been fatter woodchucks. The pasture is filled with the trial cawing of young crows. The swallows nearly clip me with their wings as I throw hay down from the loft. The bees are populous. The pasture at dawn is covered with spiderwebs that look like the footprints of ethereal elephants. The scarlet bee balm is in bloom down by the mailbox, and the thistles have purpled. The hollyhocks are coming into blossom and also rotting in the leaf, as they always do. The black barn cat pauses to decide just where his blackness will be most welcome, and in pausing chooses.
The days still come in order. Gray light collects in the bedroom long before dawn. Then comes a bleached noon and nearly always the threat of a late-afternoon thunderstorm. When rain falls, it’s a relief. The darkness is annotated by fireflies, who have been unusually numerous—or is it unusually bright?—this year. The crickets are whining away, as if they were somehow reeling in August. Moths beat against the windows, and now and then I feel the presence of a bat feeding among them. I’m laying in all the thinking I can against a time when summer is in short supply.
August 3
At the moment, I’m sitting in my office watching someone else mow the lawn. He’s just caught the mower blades on some weed-barrier cloth at the edge of the hostas. He’ll probably clip the hidden rocks just down the hill from the paperbark maple. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he got stuck in one of the holes I dug for a tree that never got planted. I never think about these things when I mow the lawn. I miss them instinctively. They’ve grown into my bones like everything else about this place—the bedrock submarines surfacing in the middle pasture, monarchs drifting over the milkweed, bumblebees drinking at the edge of the spot we keep wet for the pigs.
I came here thinking about the impression I might leave on this place. It was a foolish thing to think. It has worked the other way around. Some days I feel like a grave rubbing, as if the record of this place, the terrain, had been traced onto me. Not that there haven’t been plenty of changes here. But none of them begin to add up to the changes in me. The tractor is the same as it ever was, only dustier. The first time I drove it I barely recognized myself. I felt like I was acting a part, lifting and lowering the bucket with an almost painful self-consciousness. Now it’s simply an extension of who I am. Or perhaps I’ve become an extension of what it can do. So it goes with every tool on this place—the chainsaw, the pry-bar, the mower.
The farmers brought hay from Massachusetts this morning and that meant lowering the hay elevator from the loft. I do it once a year, always the same way. I pretend I know what I’m doing, but I’m doing only what the barn and the elevator and the horses and the hay wagons require me to do. And now the bales come jerking up the elevator, and I swing into an easy rhythm, arms heavy, using the bale’s weight against itself. It may look as though I’ve tossed that bale in a long arc, back to the darkness where the stack is rising. But I know now that that bale has used me to fling itself. I stand in the barn opening, trying to feel a breeze and pretending to have thoughts. But I know, too, that the thoughts are having me.
August 16
I’ve been thinking of a line by A. J. Liebling quoting the man he called his literary advisor, Whitey Bimstein, who also trained prizefighters. “I once asked him how he liked the country,” Liebling writes. “He said, ‘It is a nice spot.’ ” I love that line. It reduces the nonurban land surface of the planet to a single, homogeneous vanishing point. Mr. Bimstein, without knowing it, was perpetuating an ancient poetic habit, singling out an idealized setting—a locus amoenus, or pleasing place—from among the chiggers and ticks, the pokeweed and the poison ivy, in the actual countryside. I know some of Mr. Bimstein’s rural counterparts. They’ve lived in the country their whole lives and never once been to the city.
Our house isn’t far from the highway, and every day is filled with traffic passing by, some of it clearly heading for a nice spot somewhere. Most of the time I ignore it, but every now and then a car slows down and I can see the occupants looking up the hill at the horses or the geese or at me on the tractor mowing the lower pasture.
I wonder what it is they see. I begin to feel a little allegorical, like a peasant shearing sheep in a medieval book of hours. I begin to wonder what I stand for in the eyes of those passersby, whether there’s a moral to me or whether I simply illuminate a month in the calendar. This place is a nice spot in itself, and so I’m happy to pretend to impersonate one of the merry rustics even as I go about teaching the pigs to like scratching.
These days I’m a little dizzy with that doubleness. The city has come to seem like a place of nearly perfect sincerity. The country, it turns out, is a place of pervasive irony. This is exactly the opposite of what I always expected, the opposite of what the pastoral poets taught me to expect. To understand rural irony, all you have to do is watch a woodchuck in among the cabbages. It makes a perfect mockery of my intent in planting those cabbages. The woodchuck, sitting erect and nibbling, seems to imply that if I’d been just a little more sincere, this would never have happened. There’s no laughter more hilarious, or more cutting, than the laughter of farmers.
So I stand in the pasture watching the heads turning in that slowing car, and I wonder do they see the man who pines for the city and inwardly blames the pastoral poets? Do my T-shirt and jeans look like overalls to them? Am I wearing a straw hat and chewing a blade of grass in their eyes? But then I look a little closer and notice that they’re fighting over the map, lost on the way to some pleasant spot further north.
September 28
On Wednesday last week, I made a quick trip to Washington, D.C.—down on the dawn express, back on the dusk. And because I was riding in business class on the Acela I was surrounded by the sounds of business—the young women whose voices ring out like high heels on marble, the false laughter of a young executive talking to a headhunter on his cell phone. (He makes 175, going up to 200 in December, and is happy to relocate.) Everyone around me was speaking managese, that strange dialect used among the shepherds of other humans to communicate an enthusiasm for communication. It sounded as though the English language had been seeded with advertisements advocating the use of the English language.
The full moon was rising on the ride home. At first there was just the suggestion of a disk low on the horizon. It might have been a moon painted on old red brick, faded and soot-stained over the eons, the remnant of an ad for some forgotten nocturnal medicine. I’d been watching the way Baltimore backs blindly onto the tracks—the toothless old houses beyond despair, leaking their privacy into the night. And then we were passing the water’s edge, and there was the moon just beginning to glow, though the night was too muggy for the water to catch the moon’s reflection.
There was an ancient notion that the moon’s orbit marks the boundary between the immutable heavens and the mutability of the sublunary sphere. Against the backdrop of urban demise and development, this moon seemed impossibly constant. Even along the shore, where the flat waves seemed to abandon the land over and over again, the moon persisted. To really understand the metaphor of the moon’s mutability—the inconstancy of its path through the sky, its time of rising and setting, and especially its phases—you would have to live in a much darker world, where you could feel the steadiness of the night sky. The byword for mutability these days is the planet Earth.
Something about the moon brings to life one metaphor after another. Long ago, I described a full moon rising in far northern California as “a fat man climbing a ladder,” which was accurate at the time. But this moon wasn’t a fat man climbing. It seemed to hang over the horizon, though the word hang is an injustice to the forces that governed the moon’s appearance. Slowly it slid up the sky, and its color deepened. I tried to name its colors as it ascended and in doing so remembered how steadily and surprisingly life supplies us with the right analogies.
Just as darkness was really taking hold, I let myself say—and it was a cliche—that this moon was as ripe as a tropical fruit. It really was exactly the color of the flesh of a tropical fruit I’d bought the night before. The fruit was called a mamey sapote, which comes from Central and South America. Unpeeled, it looks like an oversized, oval potato. But under the rind is a deep mahogany seed and the mildly sweet flesh of a ripe September moon, which is slightly aphrodisiacal, they say. Not only was the moon that night the color of the pulp of a softening mamey. It wore the same open-mouthed expression as the woman behind the cash register when she realized that the mamey she was ringing up on Broadway
cost some five hundred times more than it did in the markets at home in Ecuador.
So the train hammered and rocked along, and the business of our rail car went quiet while the world outside receded. For another few minutes the moon was still the pulp of a singular, arousing fruit imported at great cost to be purchased as a curiosity from a woman who knew exactly how ordinary it was and how little it was worth. But soon the moon rose into some new analogy, and by then I’d fallen asleep.
October 24
Soon a farmer and his son will come to the farm to kill our two pigs. If that sentence bothers you, you should probably stop reading now—but you should also stop eating pork. The pigs weigh nearly three hundred pounds apiece, and killing them is the reality of eating meat. I talk to the pigs whenever I’m in their pen, and ever since June I’ve been slowly taming them, getting them used to being scratched. I truly love being with the pigs. And taming them means it will be that much easier for the farmer and his son to kill them swiftly, immediately. If I have no more foreknowledge of my death than these two pigs will have of theirs, I’d consider myself very lucky.
The questions people usually ask make it sound as though I should be in a state of moral outrage against myself. They imply that it’s impossible, or indecent, to scratch the pigs behind the ears and still intend to kill them. Saying that it’s quite possible isn’t much comfort to anyone. People assume I’m either confessing a terrible defect of character or declaring that I prefer bacon to living pigs. If I belonged to a more coherent rural community—one that comes together as a unit for pig-butchering in the fall—I would get to see the greater comedy in it all, the sudden abundance, the culinary wealth a well-fed pig represents. But it’s hard to act out a social comedy of that kind when the cast is a gruff farmer, his gruff son, and my wife and me, who have been silenced by the solemnity of what we’re watching.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 15