More Scenes from the Rural Life

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Part of the fun of rereading is that you’re no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Rereading Middlemarch or The Great Gatsby, I no longer have to pay attention to the motion of the train. I’m able to look out the window and contemplate the scenery as the sentences go by. While the plot is busily taking place, I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the thicket of the language itself—a pleasure as great as discovering who marries whom, who dies and who does not.

  The real secret of rereading is simply this: it’s impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard—always a stranger. I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves while shelved? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice?

  I imagine all the characters rushing to get back into place as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”

  June 28

  For the past month, late-afternoon thunderstorms have coasted across the farm. After three or four storms in as many afternoons, they seem almost domesticated—an aunt or uncle stopping in for a surly, savage tea but leaving the air surprisingly refreshed in the aftermath. While the storm was building one day, I found myself imagining words we might use to capture the sound of lightning and thunder, but don’t. As the skies darkened around tea time once again, I could have sworn I heard crumpeting in the distance.

  It’s late afternoon as I write. There is blundering just beyond the tree line. Soon the tuberous blunderheads trundle over the horizon, and as they approach they begin to wampum, wampum, wampum until at last they’re vrooming nearby, just down the valley. Or perhaps they’re harrumphing and oomphing, from the omphalos of the storm. Onomatopoeia is such a delicate thing.

  But as the clouds tumble into position directly overhead, the sound changes, as does the color of the day. Suddenly the air is grackling, dark and furious in its plumage. The lightning and thunder begin to come as one—ZEBU! ZEBU!—drowning out the wishing of the rain and the concurring of the wind, which turns the maple leaves white-side up. Hail begins to adder on the skylights, and soon the only light left in the world is the sickly green of the storm’s hunkering belly. The roar in my ear is the sound of the gravel road toshing away, worsing downhill and forming a lake on the highway. Water runs in revels and midriffs through the pasture, where the horses stand indifferent to the caucus around them.

  And then it’s over, just like that, only a bumbling far to the east of me, a last faint snicker of lightning. The sun gloats in the sky, casting a gleam on the pasture where there was so much umbering and ochreing only moments before. Steam begins to rise from the horses’ backs, and the extravagance begins to leak out of the evening. The grass in the pasture lies in scallops, as if a great scaled beast had recently slumbered there. The static electricity of the day has been discharged. The storm has left me ravenous, hungry as a raven.

  July 17

  Day after day, night after night, life on a farm is an exercise in comparative living. This is how humans go about their lives, and that’s how other creatures manage. The big difference, I can say after twelve years of watching, is sleep. What a lot of shut-eye all the other species get, and how sleep deprived humans seem in comparison! I have to wake the dogs to take a nap with me. Out in the pasture, two of the horses stand in the posture that says they’re sleeping, one heel raised, one hip dropped, lower lip slowly giving in to gravity. The third horse is lying down, doing her impersonation of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow while the white line on her belly gleams in the sun. The entire farm is comatose in the heat of the day.

  I can only wonder what it’s like to be so well-rested, to know that the deep pool of sleep within you—the somnifer, I suppose it’s called—is filled to the brim. It’s not just a matter of how much sleep the animals get. It’s how abrupt the border between sleeping and waking is. I carry sleep inside me too, and I’m a good sleeper. But not compared to the creatures around me. For me, sleep is a kind of orderly embarking. For them, it’s a sudden plunge—a nod, a shudder, and the instantaneous snoring of those that snore—the dogs—and the silent dozing of the rest. They live in a mirror universe of sleep and waking, and all day long they pass effortlessly back and forth.

  What I most admire is the animals’ attitude toward daytime sleeping. It is without prejudice because, unlike humans, they know there’s no propriety in sleep. It steals upon you when it steals upon you. It rises up and claims you, no matter how hard you try to confine it to the ghetto of night. You’re not a worse chicken for snoozing in the early morning, not an inferior pig for napping the afternoon away in the shade beneath your house. To grasp the force of human culture, all you have to do is consider how hard we try to organize our sleeping.

  And that’s the nub of it. I conform to an artificial pattern of sleep, trying to get a mythic eight hours in the course of the night. But all around me are natural sleepers, sleeping in rhythms established only by their bodies and the flight of the sun and moon overhead. Almost none of us have ever experienced that, not since infancy at least. It must feel wonderful.

  July 30

  I don’t detest slugs. They’re a perfectly valid life form, as successful in their own terms as Homo sapiens. I discover them in the garden. I find them on the stone walk in the early morning. I step around them, respectfully. But now I find them on the walls of the house, climbing the door jamb, climbing the door itself as if they were going to pick the lock and come in out of the rain. In their form, their liquid, droplike appearance, they distill the essence of this appalling summer. It’s as if the thunderheads—rising fungally above us—were now raining slugs.

  The summer so far is a reminder that water isn’t the neutral substance we imagine it to be. It’s a powerful solvent. Up here, the world is dissolving before our eyes. During a heavy storm—the kind we’ve had day after day—you also begin to understand that water has a purpose of its own. It’s always pressing its mechanical advantage. The merest tongue of a rivulet slips under a stone, and the gravel road washes away. The run off catches an edge of asphalt, and there goes a section of highway, great slabs of tarred road cantilevered downstream.

  In the downpour the other night, just at dusk, I came to a temporary bridge at a construction site on the highway north of here. The bridge crosses a meek little stream called Kinderhook Creek. But it had risen and risen through the day and now it had sluiced over its banks and was on the verge of shouldering the bridge aside. People stood outside watching in the rain, hands to their mouths in concern. From the look in their eyes, you could tell that what they were seeing wasn’t a flood. It was a metamorphosis, a transfiguration, some slumbering protean god rising out of the streambed and walking the Earth, treading not too carefully among the prefab houses.

  As the storm began that afternoon, the horses moved out into the open from under the maples along the fence line, shaking their heads up and down. They came to the place they always stand, square in the middle of the pasture, and settled into immobility. The hiss of the rain rose into a drumming roar, and I thought about the shelter the horses had found in their own stasis. There’s nothing like a good storm for washing away mental debris. I stood there, looking out the window, while the kitchen door swelled in its jamb and the slugs began fingering their way upward toward the knob.

  August 28

  My internal timekeeper went out of order this summer—broken down by the sodden month of June. Time passed as usual, and all the biological events that happen on the farm h
appened in their usual order. But somehow I made no connection between the two. Every blossom, every sunset and sunrise, is a temporal sign, and yet I failed to recognize them as such, like a person who has forgotten how a calendar works.

  A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the goldenrod beginning to come into bloom. It seemed like an oddly detached fact, almost anomalous, as if it really had nothing to do with me. And yet the goldenrod ripens over the landscape of this farm with nearly the same power as the leaves turning in the fall. It’s one of the strongest temporal clues I know, and I usually respond to it the way I respond to most signs of a shifting season, with an inward emotional tug. But not this year. I seem to be absent, somehow, or perhaps I’m resting in the lull of late summer. Or perhaps I’ve truly become just another of the creatures on this farm.

  I don’t suppose the bees answer the blooming goldenrod with a rush of emotion. I don’t suppose they contemplate time at all. They’re acutely aware of the sun’s position in the sky. They’re connoisseurs of ripeness, the moment of nectareous perfection in each blooming species. And yet I imagine that time for them is simply the aggregate of those moments. They aren’t cues to something else—to an abstract sense of temporality, an awareness of one’s life-arc. In the life-sequence of the hive, bees certainly know what comes next, the order in which things are done. But it isn’t—or so it seems to me—a next-ness that reaches beyond the task at hand. And yet what could all that honey mean except an awareness of the future?

  What I needed, besides the goldenrod, was a couple of cool nights. And now that they’ve come, I can feel my clock restarting. The goldenrod is pointing headlong into September, as it always does, and soon the world around me will be turning copper, deepening the blue overhead. I moved to the country, long ago, in order to live with time. I believed then that it was something happening in the world around me. Now I know that it’s really passing in me.

  October 12

  If you drive up the Pinedale way from Lander to Jackson, you get the full brunt of it—Wyoming on the move. The town of Farson, sixty miles south of Pinedale, is a good place to take it all in. It used to be little more than a dusty crossroads. Now it’s a staging and storage depot for equipment used in the Jonah Field—a gas field that boomed in the last decade and is now the economic heart of Sublette County and the western half of the state. The highway ripples with gas traffic—pickup trucks with jib cranes for lifting pipe and gear, bigger trucks towing crane-fitted pickups, the biggest trucks hauling machinery and rigging of every kind.

  But it’s October, so everyone is on the move. Ranchers on horses are moving cattle down off the leases well upslope, and a state-wide convoy of aluminum cattle trucks is moving to meet them at the corrals and chutes. The cattle trucks travel in a hailstorm of grit, which rattles over my car as they shudder past in the opposite direction. With the wind blowing stiff out of the west and snow kicking up from the tires of the trucks coming at me, I can hardly tell which ones are loaded with steers and which are empty.

  As the cattle move down from the high country, the elk hunters move up. Most of the pickups without jib cranes have four-wheelers in the back—all-terrain vehicles with rifle-scabbards on the sides. Horse trailers stand parked at nearly every access point along the road. Three or more trailers means elk hunters. One or two means ranchers on horseback gathering cattle. Every trailered horse I pass on the highway is already saddled, ready to step down and ride out.

  Early snow plummets from the clouds, bringing down limbs on the cottonwoods, which still have their leaves. It isn’t a drifting snow—it isn’t cold enough for that—but it swoops down on the school buses, slowing their daily exodus onto the gravel roads, over a sagebrush horizon and a wheezing stop at a long ranch drive. I see a band of antelope standing in a hollow under the wind. Just up the road, three riders make their way back to the horse trailer and home. It’s a good direction to be going.

  November 9

  The grass has stopped growing, and so has the wild mint and spotted-touch-me-knot. The snow hasn’t begun to fall. Most of the firewood is stacked and all of the hay. The thistledown has blown, milkweed ditto. The leaves are down. That’s about as organized as it gets around here.

  For a few weeks in midautumn, I feel as though I can see the farm plain. I get a clear picture of what needs doing, and I rediscover the pleasure of doing those things one at a time. A rubber feed pan needs moving from the chicken yard to the barn. I walk it down, leave it there, and it stays put. In summer, every object on this place gravitates freely from place to place. Every morning I get up, and everything is everywhere else. That feeling goes away when fall comes. Fall is the season of staying put, everything but the leaves.

  There was a wet, sloppy dousing of snow the other night, heavy as a deep depression. The dogs and I looked at it regretfully, as if the darkness were growing even thicker as the snow fell. But that, too, is the beauty of this time of year. Darkness can only get so dark, so deep. What it does get is longer, and yet even that’s good news. We’ve been here before—in the long dark of December, the deep chill of January. This isn’t some galaxy we’ve never visited.

  As the snow melted the next morning, I found myself wondering how it all feels to the striped-bark maple I planted a decade ago. Its leaves were among the first to fall, but now its twigs are stark with dull ruby buds. They’re poised for a season I can’t imagine yet. It’s tempting to believe that all of that maple’s strength has swollen precariously in those buds, but it hasn’t. It’s deep underground, rooted in the equilibrium of Earth itself. Horticulturists say that a good wind firms up a young tree’s roothold, and that’s how I’ll think of this season. Here in the clarity of fall—before the weather gathers and snow climbs up and down the storm—I look for ways of increasing the order in life, firming a roothold I too seldom feel.

  December 2

  This farm lies on an eastward-facing slope, which rises gradually to a thickly wooded ridge in the west. I can feel the mass of that hill whenever the sun goes down, and yet when the wind is blowing, there’s very little lee to it. Last week, the wind came ripping over the crest like breaking surf, scurrying leaves out of the pasture, knocking down sections of post and rail fence, gnawing at the trees with a suctioning, siphoning sound. All day long, the air outside boomed and roared.

  By evening, even the horses were weary of it. They’d been blown about all day long as though they weighed a few ounces instead of a thousand pounds apiece. A tree cracks in the distance and they trot, alarmed, across the pasture. A whirlwind of leaves twists past, and they race away from it. The corner of a tarp gets loose and off they go. They transmit this emotional energy directly to me, undiluted. This is why I like pigs and chickens. In a high wind, the pigs lie close together at the back of their house, snoozing, straw pulled over their heads. The chickens sit on their perches, knitting and doing their accounts.

  The day was abraded by the wind and then the night. But sometime during the dark, the wind dropped, a phrase that makes it sound as though it got tired of running and fell to the ground rapt in slumber. The next morning was still, smoke rising straight up from my chimney and those down the valley. There was a strange sense of propriety, a primness in the way every tree had come back to attention. The day before, I could see the horses trying to shrug off the wind, which pressed them closely. But in this new silence, there seemed to be an aura of stillness around them. They were no longer bracing themselves. Their bones and sinews had relaxed.

  And I relaxed too. Like them, I stood in the sun feeling the strength of its rays now that the wind wasn’t scattering them. When the wind blows, the horses always stand with their heads facing away from it. In the morning quiet, they were no longer magnetized. Without a wind, they were free to face in any direction they chose. Without a wind, the day could go any way it wanted.

  December 8

  Not quite fifteen years ago, my wife adopted a mixed-breed puppy
she found tied to a storage tank behind a gas station in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I say she adopted it, because I wasn’t sold on the idea. We had a new pup already—a Border terrier named Tavish—and this gangly new addition looked, in comparison, like a badly made dog. Darcy’s feet were too small for her body, her hind knees were weak, and her coat, someone once said, made her look like a wire-haired golden retriever. But who ever loved a dog less because it was ugly?

  And now it’s all these years later. Darcy still makes it up and down the stairs, hind feet splayed, knees no longer flexible. She lies on the lawn, basking like a lioness, and barks at the pickups going up the road. Much of the day she has the look in her eyes she has always had, the look of a gratified mutt. But there are hours now when her eyes, misty with cataracts, seem worried, hollow. And she has stopped eating, or rather, she eats with deliberation and reluctance, a spoonful of this, a forkful of that, a good day at the dinner bowl followed by not so good ones.

  Which means that now is the hard time, because the decision to be made must be made on its own merits. According to the vet, there are no signs of disease, other than the disease of age—nothing to force our hand. When Tavish died four years ago, his liver was failing, and there was no choice but to sit on the floor with him and hold him while the vet inserted the final needle. Darcy raises the matter of an owner’s responsibility in its purest form.

  I’ve known too many people who waited far too long to put their dogs to sleep, and I’ve always hated the sentimentality and selfishness in their hesitation. Last week, watching Darcy out in the sun, it felt as though I was trying to decide exactly when most of the good life inside her has been used up. Is it conscionable to wait until it’s plainly gone? Or is it better to err on the side of saying good-bye while she’s still discernibly Darcy, when there are a few good days, maybe weeks left, while she seems, as she nearly always does, to be without pain? There’s no way of knowing how much time she really has, no looking for a request from her.