Because we do watch. That’s part of the job. It’s how we come to understand what the meat means. The word meat is at the root of the contradictory feelings the pig-killing raises. You can add all the extra value you want—raising heritage breed pigs on pasture with organic grain, all of which we do—and yet we’re doing this for meat, some of which we keep, most of which we trade or sell. It makes the whole thing sound like a bad bargain. And yet compared to the bargain most Americans make when they buy pork in the supermarket, this is beauty itself.
Knowing that you’re doing something for the last time is a uniquely human fear. I thought that would be the hardest thing about having pigs. In fact, it’s not so hard, though it reminds me that humans have trouble thinking carefully about who knows what. One day soon I’ll step into the pen and give the pigs a thorough scratching, behind the ears, between the eyes, down the spine. Their tails will straighten with pleasure. It will be the last time. I’ll know it, and they won’t.
October 30
Suddenly, in the absence of a general, killing frost, people have become expert in the subtleties of what the season hasn’t delivered. The other day I heard a farmer refer to the “high” frost that hit his farm in upstate New York. It coated the windows on his pickup but didn’t touch the fields. Down in the valleys, people know that the frost on their lawns doesn’t count, because the hillsides above them haven’t been hit. A killing frost to a pot of basil is a pleasant evening to a stalk of Brussels sprouts. Until the past few days, even the basil hasn’t been bothered.
But I think the first frost has finally come. It wasn’t a deep black frost, the kind that makes the unprepared gardener weep. Two mornings in a row the pasture has turned white, and the thick stands of goldenrod have given up the golden for silver instead. Even the fields of corn stubble have been glazed with anticipation, a readiness for snow if snow ever comes again. A thin line of woodsmoke hangs just above the trees, and where the hillsides rise above the highway, the woodsmoke lies in tendrils, the way water vapor does on a wet summer day.
Everyone up here has noticed how late the frost is and how deep into October some of the trees have kept their leaves. Pastures that were going brown in the drought of summer have greened up again. There has barely been skim ice on the stock tanks. But if things seem awry and you want to talk about it here in the country, you talk about what it costs when the fuel truck comes, and you feel uneasily grateful that it’s come so few times yet this fall. Winter usually arrives on a tight schedule, and it’s hard to regret a little slack, even if it feels worrisome.
I’m still waiting for the hard frost, the one makes the steel gates bitter to the touch and drives the bees deep into the core of their hive. That frost puts away any thoughts of last-minute regeneration. It makes it clear that time is going to have to pass—and it’s going to have to get a lot colder—before there’s any hint of rebirth. When that frost will come is anyone’s guess. Right now, the frost we’re having still seems ornamental, a last-minute embellishment for Halloween.
November 19
I’m sitting at the northwest corner of my grandmother’s table in a house on the edge of a small Iowa town. I’m young enough to feel that my presence at the table is a promotion. There’s something bewildering in the passing of plates, the coming and going of serving dishes, and I can see—looking into this memory from a long ways away—that the adults at the table find my presence a little comical. It makes them speak to each other in asides and to me in a language that seems both ironic and slightly formal, as if I were an ambassador from the everyday planet of children to the special planet of Thanksgiving, where dinner is eaten at three.
With the turkey comes teasing. Here come the mashed potatoes, and teasing. Cranberry sauce, more teasing. It’s the condiment of choice at this Thanksgiving table, and I’m very fond of it, in part because the adults are so busy teasing each other, too. I really have no idea what they’re saying, but I can sense the pleasure in how they’re saying it. I don’t understand the way they make each other laugh, but I end up laughing with them. Even now I can almost taste that laughter, the way I can still smell an overcooked undertone in the turkey gravy.
The women orbit the table, never sitting for long. Their responsibilities are clearly superior to the men’s and more immediate. Back and forth to the kitchen they go, always with an air of preoccupation, as though some secret is hidden there, in the oven, behind the sink, out on the porch. This is fussing, which isn’t entirely unrelated to teasing. It, too, is a kind of attention, a language that, in one aunt, is puzzling and anxiously self-referential while in another it’s the soul of generosity.
Soon we’re all so busy eating that my presence at this table of adults is no longer something separate or special. It’s as though they all forget at once that I’m here. Somehow, that makes them specially visible to me. I can watch them without being watched myself. And what I notice isn’t one adult or another. It isn’t the place settings or the table decorations or the hands and elbows and napkins and mouths. It’s the way it all comes together, the clearing created by sitting round a table and facing each other over a feast.
I was young enough then to be getting down from the table after pumpkin pie rather than getting up, the way the grownups did. And I’m surprised to realize that I remember the feeling of doing so. It seemed to me that something was missing, and thinking back, I know what it was. Grace was said at the start of the meal—a pause before eating—but we should have paused at the end of the meal, for a second grace, before we all left the table. All these years later, I haven’t turned out to be a grace-saying man. But I’m grateful for the people around me and for their coming together. The thanks we say as we sit down together is also the thanks we should say before we separate, before we’re hurried away into life.
November 21
A couple of days ago we had what the forecasts call a “wintry mix,” which sounds to me like something you set out in bowls at a cocktail party this time of year. It was, in fact, rain, snow, and sleet mixed with sand and salt and the sludge that gets thrown from the tread of tires. One minute the snow was falling in clumps, and the next it was raining. The sky was the color of duct tape and it let about that much light through. A “wintry mix” makes you want to stay home—or perhaps go into the world foraging for provisions simply for the pleasure of getting home again.
This is the kind of weather—true November weather—in which I learn to admire the stoicism of the animals all over again. Stoicism is the wrong word if only because it implies an awareness of being stoic—a sense of putting up with what you have to put up with. I know the horses are aware, but I understand it as an awareness that isn’t busy comparing states of being. They stand over their hay in the wintry mix, and they seem to take it as it comes. I imagine them thinking, “No flies!” as a way of enjoying this grim weather. Even that implies a differential state of mind.
Till now, this has been a bright oaken autumn. The most vivid fall colors came and went—the sugar maples garish as always—leaving behind the oaks, which hold their leaves far longer. The last few weeks have been dusted with a dry, wooden light, and the oaks have shown just how various and pungent their colors can be, while behind them the beeches hold out their leaves more stiffly. It was as if the oaks had all stepped forward a couple of weeks ago to reveal their pendulous, lobed leaves, to remind us of a spectrum of color that goes undisplayed most years.
But everything changes on a wintry day. The woods seem to withdraw, though the snow on the ground creates the illusion that you can see deeper into them. The brightness vanishes, and that gives all the subtler colors a heightened presence. It doesn’t take the oxblood of an oak’s leaves to impress you. It takes only the variations of gray on the bark of a maple tree.
As voluminous as the woods seem in summer, when they’re full of shadow, now is the time they seem most corporeal, most alive. I don’t mean the fact that you can tr
ace a squirrel’s route along the maple high line or watch the woodpeckers in a hickory queuing for suet. I mean that the trees seem to be making a gesture of a kind they never do when the leaves are green, as though they can only really be themselves when the light is low and the air is damp and the year is drawing in.
December 3
For the past few days I’ve been writing in rural Wyoming, not far from one of the main routes to one of the major coalbed methane developments in the state. Morning and evening, there’s a rush of four-wheel-drive diesel pickups with flatbeds and heavy steel grill guards—deer catchers. I sometimes think it will take the energy equivalent of all the methane coming out of the ground near Gillette just to run the pickups going back and forth from the well sites. Highway 16 may look like a modest rural two-lane, but it’s the local equivalent of what some Wyoming residents have come to call the Jonah 500—the stretch of highway leading from Rock Springs to the Jonah natural gas fields near Pinedale.
But the weekend makes a break in the high-speed traffic, especially when snow is falling, as it was last Saturday. The sky was lying as low as it ever does in Wyoming, and the wind was nearly still, which made the snowfall seem oddly static, as if the sky were full of charged particles never destined to reach the ground. It was enough, though, to cut the traffic to almost nothing—here and there an SUV or a ranch pickup pulling a stock trailer. I followed a late seventies Lincoln Continental, vinyl peeling from its roof, into Buffalo, where it pulled up to the drive-through window at a liquor store. I kept going and made the turn for Ten Sleep, Highway 16 over the Big Horn Mountains.
A couple of miles up the grade, the bare asphalt gave way to a black two-track through packed snow. The storm was heavy enough to blur the world around me, to create the sense that I was driving at the center of a bubble of visibility sliding along with me, while all around the forest seemed to be closing in. The temperature dropped into the low teens, then to nine and seven, and though there was nothing particularly dangerous in the driving, there was every good reason to slow all the way down, including the best reason of all: no one else was on the road.
Long before I got to the pass—9,666 feet—I realized I was actually enjoying the slowness. And I realized that I’d long ago thrown out the notion of a “scenic drive,” a drive just for the pleasure of seeing what you can see and at a pace that allows you to see it. Partly, that’s the fault of my own sense of urgency, but it’s also an acute instinct for sticking with the pace of traffic, an instinct refined by driving in New York and Los Angeles.
That was the beauty of this drive. I was the traffic. I was free to exaggerate the severity of the weather if I liked. It gave me an excuse to peer into the stands of lodgepole pine along the road, to look down into the willows along the creeks, to ponder again the signs pointing out rock formations—and stating their age in hundreds of millions of years—on a highway that is often driven by people who believe this Earth is only a few thousand years old.
I came down Ten Sleep Canyon at a crawl, the cliffs above hidden in the clouds. After a few more miles, I drove into Worland. The safe driving lay well out of town, where the north wind had picked up and was blowing the asphalt nearly clear. In town, even the modest comings and goings of a bad-weather Saturday had churned the snow into an icy muck, turning Worland into a place where straight ahead was the only safe direction, if you could figure out how to get where you wanted to go by going only straight ahead.
Even in Shoshoni—a town spread-eagled on the high plateau—the falling snow and the falling light created a sense of enclosure. And in Lander—my destination—there was an oddly investigative feel to the way people were driving, as if they were trying to read the numbers on the houses they passed in a vain search for their own. Fluent drivers were hunting and pecking their way across town, never quite sure whether turning the wheel would produce the desired effect. On one of the side streets, a father on a four-wheeler pulled a child on a sled. A mule deer grazed on one of the lawns. The only question was whether the streets were snowy enough for a horse-drawn sleigh.
December 11th
It’s barely midafternoon, and the light outside is dropping fast. By 6 p.m. it will feel like midnight, and by midnight it will feel as though we’ve slipped into a temporal crevasse. Two nights ago, a storm passed through. It began with the chattering of sleet on the skylights and then it turned silent. The next morning, the farm was covered in ice. The wind has barely stirred since then, or perhaps I’m deceived by the new rigidity in my surroundings. Perhaps the world has frozen the way a fox does when it knows I’m watching it.
I spent some time yesterday chipping ice off the pickup. The ice fractured in thin sheets and slid down the windshield. If the wind does begin to blow, I thought, tubular fragments of ice will come raining down from all the trees. But on my trip out to the mailbox this morning—crossing the toboggan chute the road has become—I fingered the small branches on a pear tree and saw that the ice had bonded with the bark of the tree. It was tenacious, as if clinging to the tree for support. Meanwhile in the poultry yard, the geese had given up trying to get around. The chickens flapped their wings in vain, able to hover but unable to propel themselves forward. In flight, they looked like feathered asterisks.
The sun came out for a few minutes this afternoon, and, honestly, it seemed a little garish. It imposed a concentricity on the ice glare in the tree-tops, shaping partial orbits everywhere, as if the trees had nothing better to do than bow to the sun when at last it decided to appear. Then the light faded, and the world resumed its old organization. It was like watching the scene in some extraordinary pop-up book fade back into the pages. I walked down to the barn to feed the horses. The flattening light was as gratifying as the crunching of ice underfoot, a token of mid-December’s grim seasonality.
It’s now little more than a week to the bottom of the trough, where daylight is concerned. I’m always surprised when we get to this time of year, always sure that winter is darker than this. It’s a false artifact of childhood. I remember winters being colder and snowier when I was young—surely they were more opaque as well? Apparently not. As the solar system is constructed now, you can only drain so much light out of the year at this latitude.
December 31
At midnight tonight, the horses on this farm will age a year. That’s the custom—every horse has the same birthday, January 1. Like all things calendrical, this is a human convention. When it comes to genuinely equine conventions, I know enough only to notice the simpler forms of precedence—who goes first through a gate, who gets to the grain feeder ahead of the others. But I can report that the horses make no fuss about their common birthday or the coming of the new year. At midnight tonight, they’ll be standing in the dark, dozing on their feet, ears tipping back and forth at the slightest of sounds. It’s a night like any other.
I join the horses in the dark a few minutes before the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve. What makes the night exceptional, in their eyes and mine, is my presence among them, not the lapsing of an old year. It’s worth standing out in the snow just to savor the anticlimax of midnight, to acknowledge that out of the tens of millions of species on this planet, only one bothers to celebrate the way it chooses to mark the passing of time. I remember the resolutions I made when I was younger. One way to describe nature is a realm where resolutions have no meaning. It would be nearly as shocking to find horses who want to make resolutions as it would be to find humans who needn’t.
It’s not that time isn’t passing or that the night doesn’t show it. The stars are wheeling around Polaris, and the sugar maples that frame the pasture are laying down another cellular increment in their annual rings. The geese stir in the poultry yard. A hemlock sheds its snow. No two nights are ever the same.
I always wonder what it would be like to belong to a species—just for a while—that isn’t so busy indexing its life, that lives wholly within the single long stran
d of its being. I’ll never have even an idea of what that’s like. I know because when I stand among the horses on New Year’s Eve, I’ll feel a change once midnight has come. Some need will have vanished, and I’ll walk back down to the house—lights burning in the kitchen, smoke coming from the woodstove—as if something had been accomplished, some episode closed.
Year
SEVEN
January 3
The other day I knocked the mailbox off its post with the tractor. The mail doesn’t come unless the approach to the mailbox is carefully plowed. The town road crew leaves a moraine of snow and gravel in front of it when the big blade comes by. So after every storm I sculpt a sort of drive-through lane to the mailbox. I won’t tell you how I fixed the mailbox. The temperature was dropping fast, and the wind was howling. That’s all you need to know. Except that winter is full of this kind of self-defeat.
The New Year’s Eve storm dropped a lot of wet snow. Enough clung to the satellite dish to knock out my internet connection. The next storm added a layer on top of that. The dish is on the peak of the house, far too high for any of my ladders. So I stood in the yard at twilight on New Year’s Day, throwing snowball after snowball at the dish. Twice I hit it, and both times the snowball stuck to the dish. As I write, the sun is shining. It’s also zero outside. I’m waiting for a warm rain so I can rejoin the global mob.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 16