More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  The snow turns blue in the late afternoon, and it’s hard to remember how stealthy this beauty is and how violent the cold can be in the galactic night, when the stars are brooding right overhead. I find myself double-checking even my oldest habits—making sure the barn doors are latched and the gates closed, watching my footing, being doubly sure of myself around the horses. Only a little has to go wrong for a lot to go wrong in this weather.

  A hard winter is a season of attrition and clumsiness. The pleasant monotony of plowing—pushing back the drifts, keeping claustrophobia at bay—leads to daydreaming, and the next thing you know the mailbox is dangling by a single screw. I find myself clinging to a rigid routine because any variation leads to trouble. I usually gather eggs in the afternoon. The other morning, I found one lying beside the chicken feeder and stuck it without thinking in the pocket of my chore coat. When I went out again at three, I shoved a hand into my pocket and crushed the egg. I thought I’d thoroughly drained the hose to the horse tank the last time I used it, but no. I dragged it up to the house and let it thaw in the mudroom.

  At first a day near zero doesn’t feel very different from a day in the teens. The degrees seem to be squeezed together, as if there were less difference between zero and fifteen than sixty and seventy-five. That’s how it feels until it starts to warm up. The next morning, at three degrees, my eyelashes no longer stuck together. And as the day warmed, the sounds that had rung out so clearly in the freeze—the clinking of the gate-chain, the stiff squeal of my boots on the snow—grew more and more humid. I won’t need a balaclava to fix the mailbox. Only the sun can fix the satellite dish.

  January 18

  Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some New Yorkers confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it’s just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. I used to wonder at such people with a frank cultural prejudice, as if they were members of an outlandish tribe that adhered to the old ways. But more and more I wonder at myself.

  I’ve been driving for some forty years, right through what will come to be thought of as the heart of the Internal Combustion era. No learnable skill—aside perhaps from reading and writing—is more a part of me than driving. Even calling driving a part of me makes it seem too separate. It would be more accurate to say that my senses have completely engulfed the automobile, like a vining plant. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, and the automobile has completely encased my senses.

  That first time behind the wheel, probably 1965, I could feel myself manipulating the machine through an unimaginable series of linkages with a clumsy device called the steering wheel. The car—a Dodge, I think, from the late 1950s, without power steering—felt more like a fallout shelter than something mobile. I had very little sense of where it began or ended. I was keenly aware of what it prevented me from seeing. A highway was just a linear succession of blind spots. As for backing up, how could you really trust what the mirrors told you unless you got out and checked? The transmission—manual, of course—was an instrument of betrayal. To drive down the road, those first few times, was to lurch through a series of unrelated states of being.

  And now? I understand the richness of the phrase “second nature.” The car’s mirrors are no longer a cubist experiment in perception. They’ve joined together in a panoramic view of the past, of where I’ve just been. I feel the road through the tires’ treads as though they were my fingerprints. When I learned to drive, I was taught to prize continuity above everything—to feel the drift of the car, to understand inertia, to ease into and out of a stop, to emulate, in a way, the smooth orbital passage of the planet itself. Speed itself has turned into an extension of my consciousness.

  How “natural” all this is becomes apparent when you realize how few people—how miraculously few—are killed in accidents every year. If there weren’t some profound intuitive fit between us and these machines, we’d be dying by the millions. Our behavior in them reveals our innate orderliness, our willingness to get along with each other while completely distrusting the drivers around us. Imagine a time-lapse film of the roads and streets that were built on this continent in the past century, and what you would see is the growth of a nervous system—without a brain, it’s true, but a nervous system nonetheless.

  Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past would marvel more, I think, at our speed of travel and the resulting expansion of our geographic consciousness than at anything else in our extravagant culture. Someone from the future—a future that’s already embedded in the present—will marvel at our blindness and the hole we’ve driven ourselves into, for we’re completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

  And it’s all come to pass in just a couple of generations. My dad was born in the mid-1920s, just as the automotive moment was becoming inevitable. And now here I am, always wondering how much longer we’ll be driving, aware that every time I start the engine in my diesel pickup I’m firing up a dinosaur technology. America is full of people like me, who remember when gas was twenty-one cents a gallon, which is the price of admission to climate change.

  The irony is that, in the long view, my life has been defined not only by the things I’ve chosen—to read and write and teach—but by things it never occurred to me I was choosing. To be a driver—to have owned cars and trucks and trailers and driven again and again across the country—is obviously a choice. But try explaining that to me when I was thirteen and learning to drive on the back roads of Iowa.

  February 15

  One afternoon last week, Ida was stepping slowly as she came into the corral. A horse’s mobility is everything, and I began wondering about a hoof abscess or a muscle strain. But when I walked over to Ida I saw a gaping wound on her neck. I could look through the muscle wall and into an anatomical cavern. There was blood, but not the disastrous stream there would have been if the wound had been a couple of inches lower. I could barely watch Ida while we waited for the vet. I was afraid I’d see her slide to the ground.

  I don’t quite understand how we got from that terrible place to where we were half an hour later. A young vet only a few months out of school was standing beside Ida in a stall with me. It took a few tries to find the vein, but the sedative was working. Ida’s head sagged into my arms, and I could feel the sedative working on me, too, as if I were the one who had gotten the shot. The vet slid most of her gloved hand into the wound. She shaved around the opening and flushed the cavity again and again. Then came the antibiotic and the local antiseptic and then two layers of stitches, one to pull the muscle together, the other to gather the skin.

  Through all of this, Ida seemed to have surrendered herself. A couple of months ago, I shooed her up the pasture, and she threw a kick at me that barely clipped my chest. I knew it was coming as she turned away from me. She has never lived in a stall. But we stood there for an hour and more under the lights while the vet worked, and Ida never flinched or stirred. The other horses came by, one at a time, to look into the stall and see what was happening. It was a bitter afternoon and they were waiting for their hay. I searched the pasture again and again for the place where the injury occurred and never found it. A mystery wound, said the vet—all too common.

  I could do nothing for Ida. I held her head in my arms, but it made no real difference. My arms trembled from the weight the rest of the night. Somehow she kept her legs under her. I know that what I took as trust was mostly drugs. But it was also trust. If she got even half the comfort from me that I got from her, then she was fine. And she’s fine now—trotting across this prison house of ice with the other horses. It was horrifying at first to see that wound. Now that it’s healing it’s merely disgusting.

  March 19

  For some reason, the look of the woods and pastures now, just at the turning point of spring, make me think of the Civil War. Perhaps it’s the ma
tted leaves and the flattened grass or the hoof-torn earth where the horses make a habit of standing. Perhaps it’s because the woods look winter-beaten, skeletal, though they’re really the same as they were in November. The snow withdraws and leaves behind the feeling of something that shouldn’t be seen, not yet. I don’t know why I imagine a ghostly landscape—the fields overhung with the smoke of campfires and the weary presence of Union and Confederate soldiers—but I do.

  This is a deeply contentious time of year. The rains have torn out the road without fully melting the soil. What the calendar promises, the day itself retracts. Unless you knew better, you’d hardly believe the readiness of spring was anywhere to be found. The witch hazel is blossoming, but undemonstratively, not in a way that really means anything. The only sign of spring I trust is the sound of the birds singing. It’s too early to call it ebullience, but it’s pointed in that direction. They’re gathering to court and breed.

  That sense of contention belongs only to a human witness. The robins mob across the half-frozen pasture in the sleet, and yet they appear as dry and dusty as they always do. For all its disarray, nothing in nature looks discomfited. I pretend to see patience in the sugar maples and the hickories, but any patience I find is mine, and there’s little enough of that. I’m ready for a headlong season.

  There will be time to fix the fence rails that winter knocked down, time to scrape out the barnyard and make a pleasing mound of muck. This will have to be the year the old chicken yard is seeded to grass and all its occupants moved to new quarters. There’s nothing like mud season to persuade you that a fixed habitation is a bad idea. This would be a good year to let the land recover, except that the recovery I have in mind, like the wear we put on the land, isn’t the work of a single year.

  What cheers me is the thought that spring isn’t a human season—not like the seasons we create for ourselves. It comes without caring what you make of it. It may find you unprepared, ill at ease, in a state of erosion. It makes no difference. It will stir your blood anyway, once the freezing rain goes away at last.

  April 8

  Lately I’ve been thinking about the word vang. If you look it up in the glossary of Royce’s Sailing Illustrated, you find that it means a line to prevent “the peak of a gaff from falling off leeward.” That’s how it goes when you’re learning a new technical vocabulary. The language seems self-enclosed at first, each new definition an opaque cluster of words that themselves need defining. During vocabulary lessons in grade school, I was taught to try using a new word in a sentence. “There is a vang.” “Can someone show me the vang?” “How much does a vang cost?” Those are my best efforts so far.

  Part of the trouble is that I’ve never seen a “vang.” But it’s also that vang doesn’t sound like a noun to me. It sounds like the past tense of ving, which sounds like something you might do to a vong, and those are words with no meaning, nautical or otherwise. It all brings me back to that childhood feeling of being happily encumbered with new words and trying them out tentatively, watching to see, on the faces around me, whether I’d misused them. At present, I trust myself to employ only a few easy sailing terms, like mast and anchor. I worry about the rest. I imagine myself standing at the tiller and shouting out nonsensical commands: “Vang the leach!” “Steeve the bumkin!” “Harden the Quangle-Wangle!” At sea, I’m fit only to crank a winch, unless, of course, one “winds” a winch.

  Being lost in all this terminology—struggling, for instance, with the nautical meaning of scandalize—is an old, familiar feeling. I’ve spent most of my life happily sailing into fogbanks of specialized language. Some, like the vocabularies of philosophy and literary theory, never lost their slightly foggy quality, thanks to their inherent abstraction. But others, like the languages of fly-fishing and hog raising and horse riding, cleared up just as soon as I laid hands on the objects they named. I wondered what a pulaski was until I used one. There’s something endlessly appealing about the care with which the contents of the world, especially the tools of the working world, have been named. Those words—like fid, to choose another nautical term—seem to have been smoothed by the friction of so many hands over the years. This is the elemental poetry of the human mind.

  And yet it’s all just vocabulary until it comes alive. I’m a longtime reader of sailing narratives, and when I come to the technical bits—where the bumkin is being steeved and the leach vanged under gale force winds—I let my mind glaze over the way I do when I come to the math in books about cosmology. Something important is happening, and I’ll wait till the plain English tells me what it is. But there’s no glazing over when you actually begin sailing, as I did under tutelage for the first time only a few weeks ago. You find yourself at sea, awash in the natural world, and yet at the same time you find yourself immured in a vigilant properness—a clear sense of how things should be. It’s not just a matter of proper names. It’s a matter of proper actions, proper responses, without which there’s a world of trouble. There’s something deeply ethical about it all, as there always is in the command of language.

  Sailing is just one more thing I’ve taken up as an adult but wish I’d begun doing as a child. It isn’t just the experience that would have accrued by now. It’s the innateness you feel for things you’ve been doing a long, long time, the lack of self-consciousness with which you inhabit a language that seems outlandish to newcomers. I look back and wonder what I’ve been doing innately since childhood, and I can think only of this. I’ve been picking up words one by one, feeling their heft, wondering who’s used them before, and slowly adding them to my permanent collection.

  May 1

  I’ve been stopping by a local swamp where the peepers live. It’s hard to believe that the high-pitched chorus of such small frogs could amount to a roar, but it does. It rises into the night sky and swallows the listener. My mental compass seems to go awry in the midst of such an outcry, as if the peepers were jamming my sense of direction. In the darkness there’s no horizon except a silence somewhere on the far edge of that cacophony. If a peeper has a sense of identity, it must dissolve completely in that night-song, because I certainly feel myself dissolving when I hear it.

  Somehow the question of identity is always emerging on this farm. I found the body of a barn swallow lying just inside the barn the other day. It must have died just after it returned to the farm. I noticed the particularity of its body, how sharply cut its wings were, the way the darkness of its iridescent plumage seemed to glow with some residual heat. But it was the particularity of death, not the identity of life, a body in stillness while all around me its kin were twittering and swooping in and out of the hayloft. What’s a swallow without its flight?

  And then I consider myself and my species. If it were audible, I wonder what the roar of human consciousness rising over our swamp would sound like. I watch the same thoughts swooping in and out of my brain, over and over again, as if they had young to feed in the hollow loft of my skull. I find myself stunned by the human ability to think of one’s life as a thing apart with its own particularity, like a swallow held in the hand. I end up admiring the thoughtless animate persistence of every creature around me—the woodchuck without doubts in the goldenrod stubble, the horses certain in the pasture, the arrogant geese whose footprints melted the frost this morning.

  I keep a dead hummingbird in a bag in the freezer, a downy woodpecker, too. Down at the barn, the dead swallow lies beside a wren I found this winter, its tail as impertinent as it was when alive. I don’t know why I keep them except to notice, as I often do, that death among small birds isn’t corrupting. Flight vanishes, and so does song. But the feathers live on as if that swallow might wake at any moment, surprised to find itself perched in my hand.

  July 2

  The last couple of nights I’ve stood at the edge of the pasture watching the fireflies. They rise from the grass, flickering higher and higher until one of them turns into the blinking lights
of a jet flying eastward far above the horizon. I can feel rather than see the bats working around the house and in the coves between the trees. They’re feeding on insects invisible to me, and I’m watching insects invisible, though not inaudible, to the bats.

  What the insects are noticing—the bats too—is beyond me. Our perceptions overlap without ever converging in the night. There’s a solipsism in each species, a preoccupation with its own narrow concerns, that’s disarming when you first begin to think about it. All the entangled lives on this farm seem to run on separate tracks, except where they collide as predators and prey. Push this thought far enough and nature seems to fray into a disunity that’s gathered up only by our human perceptions. And yet that gathering up is just our own kind of solipsism. I don’t know whether the horses have ever made a general proposition about nature, but then they don’t know whether I’ve made one either.

  The best part of the season is that long twilight moment when the swallows are making their last excursions, just before the bats and the fireflies begin. The swallows work in the column of bugs that rises halfway up the hickories. They arc up out of the barnyard pasture and fold their wings back near the peak of the house, coasting and diving. Compared to the swallows, the early bats—fluttering between the trees—look at first like origami contraptions capable only of struggling flight. It seems unlikely that a firefly can fly at all.

  The overgrown edges of the garden darken. All the luminousness is starting to fall out of the sky, and yet I can still see the bright spots of ripening color on the cherry tree at the back of the garden. To tell whether those cherries are ripe, I pick a couple every day and eat them. So far, I wince when I eat them. And yet every bird on the place, except for the insectivores, carries a secret knowledge of the ripeness of cherries. I’ll know when the cherries are ripe by their absence.