That’s how it felt this morning—as if time had simply stopped. A crow—an extremely precise inkblot—had paused in the pasture. I counted fifteen immobile mourning doves resting on a power line. The leaves that were going to fall had fallen, and the oaks were not about to relinquish theirs. The weather seemed to be waiting somewhere off to the west. A flight of birds stirred from the branches and then settled back almost immediately. I heard what sounded like a small dog barking in the distance and realized it was a flock of geese beyond the tree line. They never came into view.
Before long the breeze will stir, and rain will begin to fall. The silent anticipation hidden in such a quiet morning will be forgotten. The cry of a red-tailed hawk will unsettle the mourning doves, and one by one those wild apples will become windfall. And as the weather changes and the clock resumes its ticking, I’ll have to consider freeing myself from the artist’s ink before it dries completely, stepping outside and walking over the hill toward the sound of those distant geese.
November 22
I’m in central California, finishing up some family business, the kind that means lawyers, taxes, the Department of Motor Vehicles in Manteca, and staying in a chain motel at a freeway exit. My room is just a few feet from a Starbucks drive-through lane. I’m only a few car lengths away from several fast-food joints, all with drive-through lanes, not to mention several gas stations and two truck stops, which, by their very nature, are nothing but drive-thru. This is a place where you realize that what Americans like to feel is full, quick.
Highway 99—the commercial spine of the Great Valley—bristles along behind me, a vulcanized mist rising from it in the rain. There’s also the faint, puckering odor of a distant industrial dairy. Where there’s new construction, the mud is light brown. Where meadows once cycled the rain, there are now parking lots beading up with an oily sheen. Main Street is still moving to this off-ramp. But this is also a place where businesses are busy going out of business. Hawaiian barbecue sounds like a good idea until you put it in a faceless box beside an on-ramp.
In the motel last night, I found myself listening to the roar of an ice-vending machine rising above the rumble of the soda-vending machine beside it and the whine of the fluorescents in the ceiling. I began to think about the sheer number of roaring machines in the immediate vicinity of this freeway interchange—machines for heating and cooling, compressing and expanding, blowing and sucking.
Some are easy to notice, like the diesel semis gearing down with a thump as they come off 99. Some, like the ice machine, seem at first almost as quiet and familiar as the sound of blood through the veins until you notice them. And then, suddenly, it’s hard to stop hearing them. At this perfectly ordinary freeway exit, the mechanical and electrical shrieking never stops.
Choose the right direction, and you don’t have to go far from this exit before you find yourself in nature—I almost said “back” in nature. Choose the wrong direction and you find yourself in the housing wasteland of San Joaquin county, where everything is changing quickly. House sales are way up—even though prices are way down—and the number of rentals is also rising quickly. Some of the commuters who moved here from the Bay Area have moved back—giving up on the idea of home ownership and a torturous daily commute.
But these are local concerns, no more the business of Exit 237B in a drive-through state than the egrets standing in an irrigation ditch a few miles away. The true business of this wayfarers’ station is to hum and whine and shriek and roar in its own glare without ceasing.
November 26
Last week in Sheridan, Wyoming, I saw a family loading groceries into the nose of a gooseneck horse trailer, while in the back the horses watched the shoppers coming and going in the parking lot. It was one of those glimpses you sometimes get—the kind that draws your mind down whatever road that truck and horse trailer might end up taking. For all I knew, the horses had been to the grocery store many times. What struck me wasn’t the oddity of doing some shopping while hauling horses—I’ve done that myself. It was the way the scene pulled me out of my own life and into theirs.
In the spareness of Wyoming, those kinds of mental detours happen all the time. The landscape tends to isolate the humans in it, and there aren’t that many humans to begin with, which increases the imaginative pull of almost every scene. I drove through Buffalo, Wyoming, while the municipal Christmas decorations were going up. Two teams of men unloaded them from flatbed trailers. Then a phone-company truck with a cherry picker mounted them high on the street lamps. I wondered what it would be like to drive under the Christmas decorations in town and know exactly how it felt to have put them up, and to have been taught how to put them up by some old-timer who had been doing this back when they were still using the old decorations, and there was no phone-company truck to borrow.
Let your mind wander far enough, as mine tends to do in Wyoming, and just about everything in the landscape draws you out after it. Driving to Casper the other morning, I began to wonder how many highway fence posts there were along a hundred miles of the two-lane road I was on. My guess was between fifty and sixty thousand, which led of course to pondering the lives of the crews that had drilled or driven all those posts and strung all that wire. For a while I counted the ravens on the fence posts, until there were simply too many. But I can report that on that morning on that stretch of road, there were seven golden eagles and one black cat sunning themselves on the tops of the fence posts, just above the frostbitten grasses.
There was also a burning car, which had crashed through the fence and set the range on fire. The firemen were just putting it out—car and grass—and the driver was stretched out on the shoulder, wondering what had happened to the simple story of his drive to somewhere. But the drama was over, and you could see it leaking out of the faces of the young firemen standing near their trucks in the road. They looked as though they could now allow themselves to enjoy the outing and the way the breeze carried the thick smoke over the ridge line and out of sight.
December 29
Last Sunday, almost all the snow melted away up here. Along the edge of the road there’s still a steep mound covered with gravel, a snowplow moraine. But the yard and pastures are suddenly bare. To the dogs, I think, this snowy farm was a relatively scentless place—all those odors trapped under snow and ice. The dogs stood on the drifts snuffing the air around them, sometimes digging at a vole track under the surface. Now they walk in the old way, noses down, questioning the soil.
The melt came swiftly, temperatures pushing sixty degrees. Before long the dry stream west of the barn—a staircase of bare rock most of the year—was running hard. Even the bees came out that afternoon, and that evening I saw a bat swooping low under the porch lights. And yet this didn’t feel like a false start, a disheartening, premature spring. It felt like getting back to the bare foundation so winter can begin all over again.
The new year is always a kind of chronological trope, an imaginary point of debarkation. After all, come January first, we’re hardly shoving off for parts unknown. We’re so deeply knotted to time past and time future that the presumption of change implicit in the new year seems like nothing more than what it is—a mental leap forward, a recasting of the imagination.
Somehow it’s fitting to come into the new year on bare ground, even as the snow is gathering again. It makes it so much easier to assess the work to be done, the decisions to be made and unmade. Some years the new year is just a gray transition from one calendar to the next, the resumption of a postponed meeting and an old agenda. But that’s not how this year feels. Time for the rotting fence posts to be replaced, the sagging gates to be rehung.
The freeze will come again and the stream at the back of the property will recede into dryness. Snow will fall, and as it accumulates it will capture in intricate detail the topography of the ground beneath it. But as it keeps falling, the detail will fade. And when the wind picks up, as it nearly
always does, the snow will drift into a whole new landscape, bearing only an oblique relation to the past.
December 30
Sometimes on the train north from the city, I catch a glimpse of a heron rookery in a swamp by the tracks. To call it a rookery, now a general term for a breeding colony, is to catch a linguistic glimpse of the great colonies of rooks’ nests—raucous, brawling places—that once dotted the English countryside. What I see from the train is really a heronry, a village of broad, well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense, concentric clouds or congealed puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.
The ice storm last month left a lot of shattered trees behind, including many in the swamp. But as far as I could tell, none of the nest trees had broken. Nor had the high winds pitched any of the heron nests to the ground. I began to wonder about all the intersecting decisions that go into a heronry. It starts with the presence of water, which is where great blue herons feed. It requires a certain height in the trees, which means trees of a certain age and branch structure. But do those qualities also give resistance to wind and severe ice storms? Or do the birds prefer certain species of tall, well-branched trees over others? No respectable heron would nest in a birch.
I’m used to thinking of evolution doing the selecting—blind, impassive adaptation over millions of years. That’s a dispassionate way of understanding behavior, of contextualizing tree selection among nesting herons. And yet evolution is like other forms of history: it explains the present, all but the inexplicable parts. To me the inexplicable part is this. A heronry embodies a system of knowledge present in the herons themselves, a complete, successful, and highly inventive understanding of the world around them. Grasping how it came to be doesn’t make it any less marvelous.
The train rumbles past that swamp a couple of dozen times a day. Who knows how many humans have looked up at that heronry? The train exaggerates the way we usually see nature—flattened against a window, moving at speed, a pattern of impressions. The hard part is learning to see nature as a dense web of interconnected knowledges. We see, in our flattened way, the dimensions of the landscape, but we miss seeing the fullness of the understandings that inhabit it. I look up at the heronry and the question that stays in my mind is this: what do herons learn from living together?
Year
EIGHT
Janaury 15
When the thermometer bottoms out, I remember that winter isn’t a season, it’s a place. Just over the hill is the nineteenth century and somewhere beyond the river lies the eighteenth. Why winter should seem so much more continuous with the past than summer is never clear to me. But this morning it’s three degrees, and I can hear Melville, a few miles north of where I am, writing to his sister, “The weather here has been as cold as ever. Other than the weather I know not what to write about from Pittsfield.”
That’s how it feels in the neighborhood of zero. There is no “other than the weather.” I feed the woodstove, keep the diesel pickup plugged in, and admire the fortitude of the crows, who look at me as if to say, “It beats freezing rain.” On the reservoirs, the waterfowl crowd into the open water. A couple of Canada geese walk along the edge of the ice as though they were lifeguards. The rivers, all but the Hudson, dwindle to a narrow sluice of dark water. It takes an effort to remember that the water—which looks so bitterly cold—is the warmest element in the landscape.
As dusk comes, the snowmobile tracks that cross the fields fade in the growing darkness, and I imagine a huddled figure coming through the trees and down the hill, stumping through the snow as if he had walked right out of the distant past and was making his way toward the lights of this house. The smoke spilling from the chimney smells completely familiar to him, whatever century he comes from. And about then in my private storytelling, I remember that I’m living in the warmer, brighter future that nearly everyone in the country of winter has always aspired to.
A couple of nights ago, dusk brought a different illusion. The clouds had been hammered flat—a cast-iron sky almost all the way to the west. But in the last few moments of afternoon, the sun slid below the overcast, diffusely at first but then coming out strong and red along the rim of the horizon. I couldn’t help feeling that this was the sun of summer shining all the way back into the heart of winter, just a glimpse to see how we were all doing huddled together here. The only warmth the last light brought was chromatic, but that was enough to turn my thoughts to soil and seeds and new shoots rising.
February 2
Up here, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. The stern snowpiles from the January storms have slumped in on themselves, looking more and more animate as the days begin to warm.
All the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when the snow isn’t public yet, when it’s only been tracked by an animal or two out on the ice and in the fields. I never see a straight track. There’s always a bend in it, as if curiosity were a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there’s no going so hard that one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess why fox prints meander along the river ice. The fox knows, and that’s enough.
Minus the human footprint, this is still a world of animal trails. An animal track is the trace of an animal mind, working things out in a nonhuman way. I see two tracks cross in a field, and I can’t help thinking that perhaps those two animals stopped to confer. And yet both tracks may have been made by the same creature, coming and going. Perhaps it stopped to sniff the scent of its former intention.
Over the fields, the hawks are laboring in an absence of updrafts. Is that how the year divides for them?—a season of thermals rising over the dark earth, and a season when snow captures the wind and holds it down? Out on the lake ice, anglers are sitting on upturned buckets, the bold ones having snowmobiled to their holes. And yet they tested the ice with no more sophistication than the deer I saw walking across Piney Creek in Wyoming a week ago. You ease out onto the surface and see what gives.
I’ve grown used to the sullen light at last, and I find myself hoping for another storm, another chapter in a private winter. But the south-facing slopes are melting quickly, and the skunks are almost certainly starting to think about breeding. Soon the male skunks will be out on the roads, and February will have come in earnest.
February 25
“You must walk like a camel,” Thoreau writes, and I can feel my lower lip drooping and a hunch coming into my back. This isn’t what he means, of course. He means that I must ruminate while walking. The temperature is in the midthirties, the wind has settled at last, and the snow has withdrawn from the corn stubble. I set my thoughts aside for a few minutes on the uphill leg of this walk. But now they’re back, and they bring Thoreau with them.
By his standards, I’m walking all wrong. But then Thoreau is a prig. He’s often right, about almost anything. What makes him priggish is the self-rejoicing in his rightness. What saves him is the spirit of self-contradiction rampaging through his work. If I were to walk like Thoreau, I’d walk elliptically, stepping into a different dimension with every stride. I can’t manage his daily four hours of scrambling through swamps. “If you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs...then you are ready for a walk,” he writes. And yet I’ve come out walking anyway.
The river is slapping at the underside of the ice along its edges. A man sits sharpening a chainsaw, cutting firewood from the debris that has piled up on the banks. I saw a pair of bluebirds in that spot a week ago. Sometimes the cedars crowd close to the ditch, and sometimes I find myself walking under the lip of a high bank where a cornfield meets the roa
d. Not long ago, there was a wind-driven cornice of snow on that bank. Now, I can smell the earth again, not the upsprung smell of full spring, but a scent that has Lazarus in it.
And still Thoreau is with me, like a border collie nipping at my heels. He’s terribly hard on any self-satisfaction but his own. We’re all one of his townsmen, a little puzzled by his orientalism, a little mystified that such a stern, practical woodsman has been overlaid with so much philosophical marquetry. “I believe in the forest,” he writes, “and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.” This is a kind of ecumenicism, at least among townsmen who believe mainly in day-corn.
Thoreau goads me uphill, and he chivvies me along the heights, and yet he repents at the turning homeward. For he has just remembered that “a truly good book is something as natural...as a wildflower discovered on the prairies of the West.” After this long winter walk, I’m going to sate my camel-like thirst, lie back on the couch, and read a wildflower. I wonder what Thoreau has to say about February naps.
March 17
A couple of weeks ago, when the snow was at its deepest, I walked up the hill in the middle pasture after evening chores. By then, I’m often trudging through my thoughts, barely noticing anything around me. Part of the pleasure of chores is that they happen in the same light every day, though the hour changes as the days lengthen and contract. No matter what I’m doing or feeling or thinking, I find myself propelled outside by the falling light, which means I’m often doing chores midparagraph. I imagine that the animals are midparagraph too, for we’re all just going about our business together.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 19