July 3
When I was in graduate school, I dug a small garden, just room for some tomatoes, sweet corn, lettuce, and a few other things. I intended to sit by the garden and watch it grow and do the heavy reading I needed to do for my graduate work. I’d grown used to the kind of books—literary criticism mostly—from which one looks up a lot and sees the weeds infesting the carrots and feels the need to do something about them. The books would drive me to the garden and the sun would drive me back to a chair in the shade with the books. That was the plan.
It was ruined by Dorothy Sayers. Her mysteries are books from which one does not look up. The weeds take over the tomato cages, pages and pages of scholarship go unread, and still one does not look up from Sayers. It isn’t the suspense. These are mild adventures. It isn’t the wit or the powers of observation or the whimsical hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, or his less whimsical foils—Bunter, his man, and Harriet Vane, his eventual woman. All of these pieces play a part, of course. But there was enough world in those attractive books—an entertainment complete enough in itself—to keep me from bothering about the world around me. I was never tempted to take a note or pull a weed or do anything but turn the pages and move my reading chair out of the sun.
From Sayers I moved on that summer to Raymond Chandler and I forget who else. It was a summer of pure detection—murders genteel, murders grisly, but always a murder being solved. I noted that my garden had begun to resemble a couple of overgrown graves. As for my mind, it would be hard to say whether it was dulled or whetted by the task of following one detective after another through the chain of evidence and coincidence that finally bags the culprit. I began to think of writing my own mystery, about a detective for whom none of the clues ever come right and who never gets his man. It was too sadly like a dissertation.
These days I scatter my summer reading throughout the year. But I know there will come a week in July or August when I ignore the beauty of the season for the ink on the page in front of me. It may be another week of mysteries or perhaps I’ll finally embark on Patrick O’Brian. All that matters is not looking up.
July 9
For the past few hours the wind has been rising and falling, the start of a storm coming in from the west. When the wind climbs, a kind of elation blows through the house—it’s the hushing sound of the leaves outside and the way the breeze sweeps the floors and lifts the curtains and slams the doors. The dogs snap to and look around when a gust whistles through the screens. And when the wind drops, it seems to drop us—the dogs and me—into the trough of an ordinary summer afternoon, the kind of afternoon when a breeze changes everything.
I spent a humid morning recently in the barnyard with the farrier, who was shoeing Remedy. Remedy was dozing over the work being done on his feet the way a customer dozes in a barber chair. First one hoof, then another, heel and toe trimmed and rasped and the shoe nailed home, followed by more rasping. The other horses stood in the corral, lower lips drooping in the heat. A twist of wind came across the pasture, up from the highway, stirring the sumac along the fence line. The farrier stopped and stretched his back. Remedy shifted his feet and looked intently at the mares. I turned my face into the wind and re-coiled the lead-rope.
There have been times here, mostly in winter, when the sound of the gale outside has made me want to go down to the basement and sit by the roar of the furnace. But the breeze this afternoon is more like respiration, in and out with a prolonged sigh now and then. When the wind is still, I can feel the expectation of a storm building. This isn’t simply the quiet of an afternoon. It’s the quiet in which something is about to happen.
I hope it’s a good storm, a high wind, rain slanting across the pastures, geese splashing in the sudden puddles, chickens huddled inside their house trying to keep the wind from getting under their feathers. For a moment, the house seems to fill with air that was just outside, just over the hill a few seconds ago. For a moment it feels like a sail filling, lifting, as though this cranky old farmhouse might loose its mooring and reach toward the sea.
The power will go out and the house will go dark. And for at least one of these summer nights, I won’t hear the sound of insects tapping at the windows and screens, hoping to come into this lighted room while the bats make havoc among them.
July 25
Early most evenings, the dogs and I walk across the pasture in front of the house. It’s a piece of ground I think I know well. I’ve fenced it twice, kept chickens and pigs in it, ridden horses over it, and watched the weather come across it for a decade now. I mow it a couple of times every year, and when the snow is good I ski around it. And yet every time I walk across that acre and a half, its topography surprises me—its lifts and hollows, the points of rock, the long slope down to the eastern fence line. I keep wanting to believe the pasture is flat.
It may be the memory of the first time I saw it. It was late August and the pasture was overgrown, its bones invisible under tall drying weeds and grasses. It’s hard to explain how mysterious it was to me, how far away the western tree line seemed, how tawny the rank growth looked, as if it were a stand of wheat ready for cutting. It was only an overgrown field, badly fenced and cross-fenced, getting ready to reforest itself. It was a season away from an upspringing of poplars. But I felt at the time as though I were standing at the edge of a limitless prairie.
Since then the horses have kept the grasses closely trimmed, short enough to make a woodchuck nervous. There’s a spring to the turf now and here and there a small clump of the bird’s-foot trefoil I seeded a decade ago. I never go into the pasture without thinking about lying on my back and staring up at the stars. Once a cool fall night comes—long after the mosquitoes are gone—that’s what I’ll do.
Looking at the pasture now is like looking at the face of a friend who has grown gaunt over the years. Cheekbone, jaw, the orbit of the eyes, they all stand out in high relief. And when the shadows lengthen—just about the time the dogs and I go out—I can see clearly how the pasture tumbles downhill from the west. If the earth under our feet were water, this would be a roaring rapid. Winter heaves stones to the surface, and the other seasons reabsorb them. But nothing has changed the underlying topography of this pasture in the decade I’ve lived here. There’s nothing flat about it. I came here seeing what I expected to see, and it’s taken me all this time to see what the pasture had to show me.
August 15
Ten years ago, I planted a row of fruit trees on either side of the driveway—a couple of pear trees and four apple trees. One of the apples died a few years ago, and when I wrapped a chain around the trunk and inched the tractor forward, the tree seemed to leap from the ground as if its roots had never held fast. I’ve pruned the apples a few times since, but one of the pears got away from me. To harvest the fruit at the top, I’d have to chop the tree down. The apples are now full of fruit, and I’m grateful to them for needing so little urging on my part. They’ve known their business and gone about it.
I’ve written from time to time about the trouble that overcomes me here on this farm, the way the land outwits me, the way my sense of time—conditioned by nonagrarian life—causes trouble again and again. I act as if mine were the only will that matters on the place, forgetting that everything that grows here has a will of its own. You have to be humble to live properly on the land. That’s one truth. Another is that you have to be able to accept humiliation. Some days that’s easy enough, just a matter of acknowledging the limits of my time and ability. Other days, it leads me into serious trouble with myself. The land doesn’t have a conscience, but I do, and the land—and what I’ve done to it or not done—is reflected in it.
This may just be a way of saying that fall is plainly coming, even though the farmers here are just finishing the first cutting of hay. The conifers have done well this summer for the same reason the farmers are grumbling—plenty of rain. I’ve scarcely ever seen a rabbit on this place before, and
yet here they are this summer, as if the rain had brought them. They huddle on the lawn, in the pasture, along the drive, as if someone had placed them there or they’d grown up like mushrooms. They don’t seem to move. They appear and vanish without locomotion. It’s a good trick.
August 26
It’s 6 a.m., a dark gray morning in late August—the dim light a reminder that it’s two months downhill from the start of summer. Ethel the Border terrier and I are behind the house investigating a woodchuck scent. There’s a dark smudge in the mist above us, and then another. The bats are returning to their bat house high up under the eaves. Each bat comes in over the roof, makes a dive for the ground, and then swoops upward toward the narrow entrance of the bat house. Some slip inside on the first try, some fall back and try again. After a few minutes, the air is still, the last bat home. Ethel and I turn toward breakfast.
I’ve watched the bats come out at evening again and again. It’s one of the joys of living here, seeing them drop one by one into the night. But I’ve seen them coming home only a few times. The bats of evening are the last flutter in a world that’s growing still. The bats of morning have already been engulfed by birdsong, rooster crow, the stirring of nearly every creature on this place. Their flight is less erratic just before roosting, no longer distracted by insects in the air. It’s as though each bat brings a scrap of night’s darkness home with it, leaving the sky pale and brightening. It’s as though night itself were being stored in the bat house till dusk.
When the last bat vanished, I felt almost absurdly alone, strangely vacant in that thin slice of morning. It reminded me of a feeling from long ago—that moment, after staying up all night, when you can feel the world gathering pace and energy just as you’re beginning to fade, the city stirring, streets coming to life, a crescendo that grows and grows. You can almost pinpoint the moment when the city reaches full throttle. You glimpse what a powerful movement morning really is. There’s no coaxing about it. It marches you right into the day, right through life.
Watching those dawn bats, I imagined them punching out of their night work as they settled, and I felt as if I’d somehow clocked into their schedule. The best use of a dark gray morning with mist in the air is to go back to bed, only a few feet—and a couple of walls—away from where the bats are sleeping.
September 4
Horse people I know all speak with great respect of a horse’s memory for place. For a long time, I imagined they meant that horses carried around in their minds remarkably detailed maps of their experience of the world. But that’s just a human way of thinking of it. There are no horse maps. To a horse, how things are is how things are until they change. Then they’re that way. The only map of the world is the world itself. Riding through country your horse already knows is a reminder of how abstractly humans take in their surroundings, how we generalize our place in the world. A horse’s attention is particular. It shows in the cant of its ears, the flicker of its eyes, the fluidity or hesitation of its gait.
I sometimes wondered about these things while my wife and I were hauling the horses to Wyoming, as we often did more than a decade ago. They stood quietly in the trailer, side by side, flanks rubbing as Ohio or Iowa or South Dakota went past. Sometimes a head drooped and a lower lip fell square and quivering. Mostly the horses watched the countryside, not quite as rapt as a dog sniffing the breeze through an open window, but attentive enough. Thinking of those things made it clear that the signs along the freeway—flashing neon, enormous billboards—were designed for a highly inattentive species. And it’s true. Every time I’ve gotten in trouble on horseback, it was because my attention had wandered.
Last week I drove past the farm I lived on when I first moved to the country. I hadn’t really expected to go that way. I hadn’t been paying attention. But there I was suddenly, in a little hollow along a river, and there was a run-in shed I’d built and the tiny creek that trickled down off the mountain to the east. I thought of a Border terrier named Tonic—now long gone—who lived there too, and it all seemed impossibly distant. I wondered if the human ability to map the world around us is connected to how separate the past sometimes seems.
It’s a question I’d like to be able to ask my horses. Are the past and the present the same for you? Do you remember those trips west and the herd you came from? Or would you have to relive it all for the memories to come alive?
September 13
For the past week, I’ve been in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle and a few kilometers shy of the restricted zone that marks the Russian border. This is the boreal forest, a place of almost surreal silence this time of year, when most of the birds have already migrated. The first night I was here, I stood in the middle of the road on a bridge over the Oulanka, a broad, slow-moving river that flows into Russia. It was dusk, a clear night, and I had come out to listen to nothing. There was no wind in the trees, not even the slightest breeze. The river below me was silent, and for the half hour I stood there I heard not a sound.
In fact, I found myself checking, again and again, to see whether I’d gone deaf. I popped my ears. I scuffed a shoe on the road. I tossed a rock into an eddy along the river’s edge. I tapped the guardrail with a knuckle. There was nothing wrong with my hearing. I listened to the Finnish night and realized that I was listening actively, trying to hear something. The human ear isn’t really meant for straining, and yet I was straining to hear. The silence felt more like an unnatural muffling of my senses than the porous stillness of the natural world.
The next week I spent in and out of the forest, listening with my eyes, so to speak, and not my ears. It’s been a cold, wet summer in Finland, a season filled with the sound of rain falling through the spruces and pines. All the Finns I met grimaced when they talked about it, as if the summer had tasted like cold, weak coffee. But the past week has been dry, and every night there has been frost. The leaves are turning fast. A fog hangs above the river in the mornings, which only deepens the illusion of silence.
On my last night here, I went back to the bridge, again under a clear sky. There are long shadows even at mid-day this time of year, and dusk is still reluctant to give way to real darkness. I was waiting for stars to appear in the clearing overhead, but they were apparently busy elsewhere.
As I stood there, I heard the faint but quite audible roar of the rapids a half mile downstream and around a great bend. Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all.
October 7
On a still day—rain threatening—a tall stem bobs back and forth in the garden. A goldfinch has landed just below the flower head and is eating seeds from it while the stem sways like a pendulum. The rain begins, and above its steady, even rhythm, there’s a clatter in the leaves and a sudden pop on the woodshed roof—a hickory nut falling. Soon the clouds tear apart overhead, and the sun spills through. Steam rises from the horses’ backs. Maple leaves are coming down in ones and twos, and the ones and twos are beginning to add up in drifts along the pasture edges.
Most of the time, nature is simply there—when I do chores, when I walk down to the mailbox, when I look up from writing. I don’t expect solace from it, nor do I theologize it with my own desires. It simply persists in sublime indifference, a quality that’s inherently unsurprising. And yet from time to time I find myself surprised by it, and I know that what I’m really noticing is the volatility of the human world.
That feeling first struck me after 9/11—a sense of shock, as I wrote then, at discovering the “old news” of nature after living amid the new news that had erupted in the city. I have the same feeling again now. Nothing in the natural world upbraids me. It offers no commentary. It has nothing to say about finan
cial meltdowns and dirty politics or, for that matter, personal grief. But the other lives on this farm do remind me how captive I’ve become—like all of us—to the tensions of this incredible human season. I can feel the pricking of shame in that sense of horrified captivation, a feeling of having forgotten something fundamental.
That’s the trick in nature. There’s no escaping to it. It throws you back upon yourself again and again. The geese shriek when they see me coming and then drop into their bassoon tones. The chipmunks freeze on the stone wall, waiting to see what direction I’ll go. Remedy makes the sound that’s usually called nickering but is really a slow, deep equine purring. I’m carrying the grain bucket, which is why. I’m also lost in my thoughts, and when I slip out of them, walking beside the horses up the hill to their grain buckets, I can feel for a moment how insubstantial those thoughts really are before they engulf me again.
November 3
Every now and then I feel as though I’ve woken up in a Rembrandt etching—a low, tangled thicket of pen-strokes from which a landscape emerges. It’s not that the sky has taken on the tint of seventeenth-century drawing paper or that the world has lost its color. It has more to do with the balance of time. I wake up and nature seems to have paused in expectation. There’s a numb overcast overhead, with little drift to it. Woodsmoke slides down the roof and onto the road. The wild apples are waiting to fall. We’re all inked in, caught in the moment.
It’s an appealing illusion. I imagine being the human in one of Rembrandt’s landscapes—that small figure standing in front of what looks like a cross between a house and a haystack. He’s resting from something. Perhaps he’s even looking out from his garden at the artist working in the distance. It took no more ink to draw that figure than it would to write out a simple equation. And yet there’s no mistaking his posture or the moment he’s given himself to rest, though that moment has now lasted since 1645.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 18