Coming back down the hill, plunging knee-deep through the snow, I stopped. There was the print of a bird’s wings spread in the snow. The snow was too dense to have taken the subtle trace of the bird’s feathering, but the shafts of the wing feathers had left their mark. From their angle and size, I guessed it was a goshawk. I looked across the pasture and saw a squirrel’s track, which ended at the wingprint—no sign of a struggle, just an abrupt vanishing. Going up the hill, I’d walked right past these marks without noticing them.
A week later, all the snow had melted, which has left me thinking about a question I don’t know how to ask, a question about ephemerality. That wingprint in the snow was a solid fact, the remains of a bone-jarring collision between two animals. One life ended there, and another was extended. But now that the snow has gone, the only trace of that wingprint is in my mind. And if I’d come down the hill in the fog of thought that surrounded me while I was doing chores, I’d never have seen the print of those powerful wings and they would have left no mark in me.
Nearly everything that happens around me in nature happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy winter sometimes retains a transcript of hidden events, but even those transcripts are rare. The bills of animal mortality are almost completely invisible otherwise. Who thrives, who dies—there’s no accounting at all, only the fact of thriving and dying.
That wingprint allowed me to glimpse the uncompromising discipline of nature. But it will stand in my mind as the model of an almost perfect ephemerality, a vision of life itself. The snow has melted away, taking with it the squirrel’s track and the arc of those wings and my own track up the hill and the burnished spots where the horses rolled in the snow. It continues to exist only in a memory, which will melt away itself one day.
March 20
When I heard that Ray Hunt had died, I found myself wondering how many times he’d saddled a horse in his life. The number must be in the hundreds of thousands. Most of us can’t put the second arm in the second sleeve of a coat as easily as Ray saddled a horse. I first saw him do it at a clinic in Wheatland, Wyoming, in the fall of 1992. I was new to saddling horses. I knew enough to know that I knew nothing about it. What I didn’t know until a long time later was just how much nothing that was. Ray was one of the people who pointed that out, without saying a word.
What I thought I saw in Wheatland was a man saddling a horse, a man who might have been saying to that horse, “Whatever you think of this is fine with me.” He meant it, but he’d also prepared the horse to be readier for the saddle than the horse could know. Gentle, but not too gentle, ready, but not too ready—that was how it went. I’ve often wondered how Ray found the balance between those things. But I realized recently that it was never that fine a calculation. Ray was ready for the consequences, whatever they happened to be. It was genuinely okay, whatever the horse did. It was all a step in the right direction. Me, I had a mental list of things I didn’t want to see happen while saddling the horse I was starting. It was a long list. That changes everything.
I didn’t get to know Ray well, which is something nearly everyone who rode with him can say. I suppose that Wheatland clinic must have looked to Ray like a bunch of worried, frightened mammals trying to saddle worried, frightened mammals. No matter what you thought of being human, you would think a little less of it after spending time with Ray. I try to understand who he was, and the best guess I’m ever going to get will come from looking at the horse he’s sitting on. She’s the purest horse in the string, the one listening and watching and feeling, with eyes as bright as we’ve ever imagined the human soul to be.
March 24
The last time I stayed at this house—up the hill and around the corner from Point Reyes Station, California—there were Holsteins grazing on the tidal flats below me. But now the tidal flats have been restored, the cows are gone, and all day long the equilibrium shifts before my eyes. On one tide Tomales Bay runs up into Lagunitas Creek. On the next tide, Lagunitas Creek runs out into Tomales Bay. No matter what time of day it is, the wind tends to confuse the appearance of the tides, depending on how it’s blowing.
I suppose those old Holsteins were tidal creatures in some sense—eating salt grass, their udders filling and emptying like the flats themselves. But now the creek channel spills out across the mud and the grass twice a day, and birds rise and settle without ceasing. Now, it’s possible to feel the bay respiring. The water is constantly catching me by surprise. I look, and there’s a bright, wind-tugged sheet of it from here to Inverness. I look again, and the light adheres strictly to the creek channel, eeling its way across the darkness.
Vultures flare above my head, and quail start across the lawn. An osprey dangles in the stiff wind, then folds and drops on its prey. Great egrets practice their stillness. Looking out across the flats, I find myself thinking of all the chronologies in which I live, all the ways a life gets measured out. The least familiar of them is the one right before me—the coming and going of the tides. There’s a suspense in it, a constant sense of expectation. I consult a tide chart and note that the tide is ebbing, but I’m not experienced enough to feel it. The best I can do is see where the water is now, and then where it is an hour from now. It’s like having to look repeatedly at the sun to guess its direction across the sky.
I always tell my writing students to avoid chronology, because we live in the thick of it. We need no reminding how it works. And that’s what I love about watching these flats. They undermine my landlocked sense of chronology. The day comes to an end, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. Morning breaks, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. The perfectly cyclical nature of the tides feels countercyclical to my understanding of the flow of time. If time were like the tides, we would surge into the future and rush back toward the past, twice daily, while the narrow balance point we call the present steadily worked its way forward.
Surely the egrets and ospreys and plovers understand all of this intuitively. So do the flocks of waterfowl that rise like a rippling on the water and beat their way out over the bay. I suspect those long-gone Holsteins would think of the tides pretty much the way I do, as a wonderment in this otherwise sensible world.
April 2
The other morning, I watched a starling make a long curving descent over a farm-field that was just coming up green. There was a breeze from the southwest, and as the starling turned into it the bird suddenly seemed to be floating—a far more aerodynamic creature than I usually imagine starlings to be. I seemed to see the true shape of the bird as I saw it then—wings extended and still—not as I usually see it, wings folded and quarreling over the bird-feeder.
Seeing a bird in a soaring descent like that—suspended from itself—always sets me wondering. What does it feel like to have wings and be able to ride them across the wind? The same thought occurs when a pair of Canada geese pass overhead, moving sharply away from me. The word flap is no more use describing the flight of geese than describing the swimming of penguins. Goose wings quiver in flight, deflecting only slightly, and if you watch closely, you can see the goose’s fuselage moving up and down against the stiffness of the wings.
At moments like those, I’m uneasily conscious of my arms and shoulders, the way I’m conscious of my legs when I see the horses standing asleep in the pasture. It’s as though I’m really detecting how little repose there is in the human body. Surely a red-tailed hawk is resting when it soars across the horizon on a thermal. There must be a sufficiency of rest even in the flight of a goose. How else could it fly so steadily and so far? To see a bird with wings outstretched is to imagine the hopeless outstretching of my own arms, which is a backwards way of realizing what it must mean to be native to flight, to feel the air beneath you as substantial as the earth itself.
To me, birds in their element always seem to be offering a comment on the human species. I see a vulture looking side to side as it slides by overhead, and it looks to me as though it
’s artfully not noticing the skill of its flight as it hunts—not noticing it for my benefit, that is. I saw the same thing in the Chilean fjords a year ago. We sailed past dozens of black-browed albatrosses while we were there, and every one of them—serenely afloat—looked up at me from the waves with the supreme unconsciousness of an athlete, unaware of its grace, just effortlessly drifting on the tide and wondering what element humans are native to.
April 16
The sun went down half an hour ago, and in its absence there’s a nearly perfect stillness in the evening. I stand outside and wonder how such a night is possible, how—in the great cycle of air masses thrusting and obtruding their way across the planet, boiling up from the oceans and scattering over the plains—this small-valley quiet comes to be. The sky is red-ribbed behind the unleaved trees on the horizon. The grass in the field is as thick as a woodchuck’s fur and just now giving up its green to darkness, which is settling like a cold dew.
If there were leaves on the trees, they would show where the wind lies. Instead, there are stiff blossoms, the aching buds of a spring that’s just about to happen. Every twig seems to end in a red knot. In the uplands, people are still dragging winter to the roadside—tangled hedgerows of ice-broken limbs. Along the even ground, an old man scrapes the plow-duff into a wheelbarrow from the edge of his lawn. I got a glimpse today of the last snow slowly rotting high on a ski slope. There’s a stillness in winter too, but it’s nothing like the stillness of a spring evening, when it feels as though every living thing has stopped quivering with expectation just for the moment.
I passed a clump of deer on the roadside the other afternoon, and they looked as though they’d been carved out of decaying wood. It was a trick of the light. A much more solid deer is crossing the horizon, walking along the ridge line that borders the farm. The deer pauses and looks down over this house and its lights, or perhaps it’s looking to the sound of the river, which is nearly as quiet now as it will be at midsummer. The sound of the river takes over for the sound of the missing wind, which has been rattling the windows for the past few months.
I know what grows in the warmth and the expanding light of spring. But I wonder tonight what grows in this stillness. Perhaps it’s only the mosquitoes hunting for the first time this year, or the diptera that will be rising and falling along the river’s edge tomorrow morning. But I think something human grows in the stillness of a night like this—fulfillment, if you like, or an untroubled hope. Soon the stars and a late-rising moon will add what they can to the calm outside.
May 5
A couple of months ago, I was asked in a public forum what language the land uses when it speaks to me. It was a serious question, and a startling one. Several glib answers drifted through my brain, but it wasn’t a setting for glib answers. So I said what I really believe—that I value the land for its silence, its freedom from language.
Not that I always experience the farm this way. There are days when I feel pestered by nomenclature, when words like Robinia pseudoacacia—the black locust, which is blooming profusely now—chime in my brain like a simple-minded rhyme. Those are the days when I get tired of words and start whistling back at the woodchuck that lives in the middle pasture. I’m getting good at a woodchuck whistle. I think that if the land starts speaking to me in a human language I’ll have to move to a boat on the sea.
One of the other panelists remarked that he thought of the land as a text, a place inscribed with profound historical meaning. This is obviously true. But the word text makes me uneasy. It’s the same old metaphor, the overlay of human consciousness upon the natural world, and it makes me realize that I’m trying to push through language toward some other way of being in nature. I know people whose most precise word for black locust is tree. And I know people who can tell you the pattern of its blooming, the uses for its wood, who can look down my fence line and say, without hesitation, which of my fence posts are locust. As for me, I can still feel the weight of those posts when I reset them. They were here when I moved to this place a dozen years ago, and I expect they’ll still be here when I’m gone.
There’s no escaping language. But perhaps it’s possible to live between the sentences. In my experience, being a writer means putting up with an inner voice—a maker of sentences—that’s always clamoring to be heard. More and more, I find myself listening for the moments when that voice lapses, when all I hear is the sound of my breathing on a steep upward trail or—not often enough—the wordless sound of a canoe slipping forward across a lake while the paddlers pause.
After a dozen years, I can name many of the species that inhabit this farm, most of the plants, and nearly all the birds. But what’s the word for the wake the pileated woodpecker leaves as it dips, flying, across the pasture? How can I imagine that language is how the land speaks when I’m surrounded by animals whose wordless attention is at least as great as mine? All I can do is put a period to this sentence and hope I can live, for a while this morning, in the pause that follows it.
May 21
The other night, my neighbor called, in tears. Her mule had foundered—that is, the inner tissue of its feet had swollen, a sometimes fatal condition that causes intense pain and immobility. The vet was coming, and there was a real chance the mule would have to be put down. My neighbor wanted me to listen to what the vet said and help her make the hard decision. By the time we got up to the barn, it was nearly dark. The mule had spent two and a half days on its side, unable to stand, but now it was standing, frozen in place and shivering with pain. The fact that it was standing at all was an improvement.
The mule had a name once, but for years it’s been “the mule,” a small, dark beast with long ears, a wicked imagination, and a genius for gates and getting through them. As I got ready to meet the vet, that was how I pictured it, an impish creature, more Puck than Bottom. But to see it transfixed by pain—caught in the beams of two flashlights—was to see only its beauty. I couldn’t help thinking of the burros that appear in Nativity scenes, wide-eyed everyday animals caught in a celestial event. The mule’s coat was sleek and dark, the densest blacks giving a glossy relief to its dark brown flanks and neck. To see a mule or a horse in pain, unable to move, is to see an animal trapped within itself, fallen back upon the dignity of its conformation, the bottomless surface of its moist eyes.
The vet was hopeful. Trimming the hooves would help, and, right now, something for the pain. And as it became clear that we wouldn’t be killing the mule that night, I caught a glimpse of something I almost never see, except in the implicit presence of death. Let me call it the unabashed vigor of life itself, the way the living force—whatever that is—filled the being of that pain-chastened mule and made death seem almost extinct. I imagined where the needle would go, and how the tremors would cease, and then the settling onto the hay and the rolling inward of the awareness in those eyes. I thought of the deaths that I’ve witnessed—human and animal—and I knew that the life in this mule wouldn’t be denied.
Afterward, I walked homeward down the road in the dark. I hope that in another few weeks, the mule will rush the fence when I pass, as it always does, catching me unaware, as it always does, making me jump midstride. I’d like to think that I’ll look at it differently when that happens. But there’s a good chance I won’t.
May 27
I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. One or two even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times as well, foraging outward, working my way through a long string of books by leaping from allusion to allusion. But at heart I’m a rereader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to reread—and then to reread them.
In part, that’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that no matter how long and how widely I read, I’ll only ever make my way through a tiny portion of the world’s literature. And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my me
mory, which is overtaxed by the simple job of remembering which books I’ve actually read, never mind what’s in them. My memory is like a beach in which the sand that washes out to sea is replaced, grain for grain, by the sand the sea washes in. I forget a lot, in other words, which makes the pleasure of rereading all the greater.
The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children, as every parent knows. And it’s certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read—witness the maddening, bedtime love of hearing that same book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection. Childhood is an oasis of repetitive acts, so much so that there’s something shocking about the first time a young reader reads a book only once and then moves on to the next. There’s a hunger in that act but also a kind of forsaking, a glimpse of adulthood to come.
The work I chose to do in adulthood contained, by definition, the childish pleasure of rereading. To be a literature student in graduate school meant being a close reader—i.e., a close rereader. Once through Pope’s The Dunciad or Berryman’s The Dream Songs wasn’t going to cut it. A grasp of the poem was presumed to lie on the far side of many rereadings, none of which were really repetitions. And the same is true of being a writer. The work of writing is partly the work of obsessive rereading, to an extent that most nonwriters would never believe.
But the real rereading I mean is savory rereading, the books I have to be careful not to reread too often so I can read them again with pleasure. It’s a miscellaneous library, always shifting. It’s included a book of the north woods—John J. Rowlands’s Cache Lake Country, which I reread annually for many years. It may still include Raymond Chandler, though I won’t know for sure till the next time I reread him. It includes Michael Herr’s Dispatches and lots of A. J. Liebling and a surprising amount of George Eliot. It once included nearly all of Dickens, but that has since been boiled down to two: The Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations. There are many more titles, of course. This isn’t a canon. This is a refuge.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 20