It comes down in the end to the pleasure she shows, the interest she takes in the world around her—and not to anything her humans feel. Even now, as the days get colder, she likes to spend more and more time outside, her nose lifted so she can take in the perfume of the world. She’s waiting, I’d like to believe, to catch a scent on the wind that will tell her what she needs to know about her own mortality. She has not had the life she might once have expected. She’s had a far better one instead. My hope is that she gets exactly the death she deserves, in her humans’ arms, at the proper time. The world will be a poorer place without her.
December 24
The school buses have left, and now the teachers are heading for their cars and trucks, the day over, the afternoon thick with relief. The bitter cold of the weekend has lifted. Out on the ice, just past the school, there’s a precise rectangle of banked snow, the outline of a skating rink that was carefully shoveled and swept clear when the snow was deep. But now, after a few warm days, the entire pond is clear of snow, all but the boundary of the rink, where a solitary man is lacing his hockey skates.
He skates away from his shoes, stick in hand, puck before him on the ice. He isn’t thinking about speed or a slap shot. He skates just bent enough to clap the blade on the ice, urging the puck forward and boxing it in. He gathers almost enough momentum from the shifting of his weight, a little more when he straightens his legs, one after the other. The whole pond is his. He’s holding himself in, making the ice last, measuring his possession of it by the slowness and grace of his movements. Behind him the snow peaks rise, for this is Livingston, Montana.
He worries the puck a little—chivvying it from side to side like a fox toying with a vole. Or perhaps it’s a gentler motion than that, as though he were domesticating the puck, showing it the limits of its freedom. Imagine the slow sweep of his legs, the clacking of the stick, the deep-night blackness of the puck on the dull gray ice, which is soundless except for the gnashing of his blades. Now he skates down the pond, dwindling and dwindling, and now he rounds back, as if to revisit the spot where he left his shoes.
I think of Wordsworth’s midnight ecstasy on the ice. This is a spot in time every bit as moving. The light is tumbling out of the sky like a snowfall of dusk. Out on their routes, the school buses are turning homeward again. Before long, the houses along this pond will spill an amber glow into the night. But for now there’s more than enough light to keep skating. There’s nothing prepossessing about the man out there except the grace of his movement and the way he keeps house with his hockey stick.
To walk past a pond while a man skates across the afternoon is to feel suddenly stiff gaited and woefully destination-bound, even though this is just a leisurely walk. The best I can hope for out here on the pavement is a stone to kick ahead of me. But inside I’m skating through the fading light too, feeling the depth of the ice under me, the poise of my blades. Like the man on skates, I know that now is the precious time. Out on the ice, he’s guarding the moment, keeping it close with his stick.
December 30
Last week felt like a last chance before winter. The snow melted, dying back until the vole trails became visible, sinuous green paths through the remains of whiteness. The ice unbound itself from the rim of the horse tanks. In the ditch along the gravel road, the runoff slid downhill over a still-frozen streambed, the water as agile and globular as mercury. A bat fluttered past my head one warm morning, resting on the clapboards for a moment and then arcing around to the east side of the house, where the bats live in the eaves. Despite the sense of relenting, the ground was still frozen solid.
And then it began to snow again, light, voluminous snow, swelling in the air and muffling every detail in the landscape. Watching it snow, I felt an unexpected sense of intention in the weather—as if those mild days, which had felt like spring, were just a way of clearing the canvas, scraping away the old paint, the old knife marks, before laying down a fresh and even ground of white. It was less a fall of snow than a fog of snow, the flakes suspended in air, never seeming to reach the earth, darkening the day and brightening it at the same time.
At the bird-feeders, it was traffic as usual. Opposite the feeders, the birds line up on the boughs of a pignut hickory and swoop in by twos and threes, titmice and juncos, a crowd of chickadees, a demure pair of cardinals. Woodpeckers cling to the suet feeders, and squirrels, red and gray, rummage among the shells on the porch. Everyone eats in a kind of mutual disturbance, which the falling snow intensifies.
The weather maps say that the edge of the storm is only a few miles west and that the storm will be shutting down soon. It will end in a last bank of dark gray clouds—so dark that the blue sky shining through their gaps will be the color of diluted turquoise. And then the sun will beam through the cold air and the sense of urgency will dissipate.
I’m reluctant to see the storm finish, reluctant, for once, to see the sun emerge. At this time of year, winter only begun, I feel the way I did when I was a child. I want the snow to keep falling and falling, soft and deep into the night and the next day and the week after, until I wake up in a world completely unknown. In that world, there will be no melting back to the vole trails over bare ground, no going back to spring. There will be only an unknown track into the dark, snowbound woods.
Year
NINE
February 4
For the spring semester, I’m renting a small house in Claremont, California, a modest ranch in a modest neighborhood. Like most of the houses on the block, its facade pays a dutiful, glib homage to the street. The house’s real attention—its gaze—is directed toward the carefully fenced backyard, where an orange tree grows and there’s shelter from the sun under the long, wide roof of the porch.
For wildlife, there are cats. I seem to be living in a feline observatory. The back porch seems to be used as a kind of theater by the cats of the neighborhood, a place to work on their soliloquies. One by one, they come across the yard and up onto the boards, where they rehearse a repertory of poses. Then they make their exit, stage left, departing through a small gap between the gate and the fence. To say that each cat acts as though it carries the key to the city is merely to say that they’re cats.
I see these cats—I’ve counted nearly a dozen so far—and can’t help thinking of a sentence by Guy Davenport: “My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I’m not supposed to know him, either.” Perhaps that’s the value of my backyard as feline habitat. It’s a college-owned house, and it sat empty for the past few months. I’m unknown to these cats, and therefore they put on no pretense. Perhaps some of them are feral—street cats. I suspect that most of them have perfectly good homes with owners unwise enough to let their pets out. My yard is where they come to be themselves.
I especially admire one nimbus-gray cat who comes walking across the yard looking like a feline bull. I’m fond of the longhair that spends a good part of the day sitting on top of the van parked across the street but takes a tour of my backyard around dusk. I stand back from the windows, hoping to remain undetected, but at least one of the cats—a gray and white—has found me out. It watches me as though it had never seen a writer in its habitat before. Then it walks away, jaded.
I’d trade all these cats for birds but the one precludes the other. I’ve seen a flicker and a scrub jay since I got here, also a hummingbird and several doves along the power lines behind the house. The rest of the birds have been turned into cats over the years, just as the desert has been turned into houses with cats in them. Meanwhile, the neighborhood dogs stand behind their fences and bark at what they think is going on.
March 9
I’ve been considering the four-way stop—the smallest and most successful unit of government in California. It may be the perfect model of participatory democracy, a fusion of “first come, first served” and the Golden Rule. There are four-way st
ops elsewhere in the country. But they’re ubiquitous in California, and they bring out a surprising civility in drivers, here in a state where so much has gone wrong so recently.
What a four-way stop expresses is the equality of the streets that meet at its intersection—and, by inference, the equality of the drivers who meet there. For the four-way stop to work, no deference is required, no self-abnegation. It doesn’t matter what you drive. Precedence is all that matters, like a water right in Wyoming, except that at a four-way stop everyone gets to take a turn being first.
Sometimes two cars—even four cars—arrive at the stop simultaneously. At moments like that, I find myself lengthening my own braking, giving an unambiguous time signal to the other driver, as if to say, “After you.” Is this because I’m from the East? Or do California drivers do this, too? I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that I almost never see two cars lurching into the middle of the intersection, both determined to assert their right of way.
I’m strangely reassured by the four-way stops I pass through here in Southern California. At each one, a social contract is renewed, and I pull away from the intersection feeling better about my fellow humans, which some days takes some doing. We arrive as strangers and leave as strangers, but somewhere between stopping and going, we must acknowledge each other. California is full of drivers everywhere acknowledging each other by winks and nods, by glances in the mirrors, as they catapult down the freeways. But at a four-way stop there’s an almost Junior League politeness about it.
And if the stoplights go out at the big intersections, everyone reverts to the etiquette of the four-way stop. But it’s a caution to us all. We can only gauge precedence within a certain distance and among a small number of cars. And self-policing—the essence of the four-way stop—soon breaks down. We need help in numbers. But when we come one by one to the quadrille at the four-way corner, we’re who we are at our best, bowing, nodding, and moving on as by right.
March 15
When the sun finally rises, this will be a gray day, a great slab of flint laid across the plains. But the sun is still an hour off, and the snow is salting down just east of Riverton, Wyoming. My eyes are straining for sight in the void out there, looking to see what emerges first from the darkness. The answer is the blackest objects—old tires that ranchers sometimes place beside their cattleguards and the cattle themselves, black Angus stirring in a creek bottom. The cattle look as though they were bred black just so humans could find them in the gloom.
But mostly there are ravens, moving in singles and mated pairs, fighting off the stiff north wind. They know the lights of this highway well, and I see them hopping into the ditches or flaring upward on the wind just out of my path as I hurtle by. I can just discern the seam between earth and sky, and in that seam—farther down the highway—I can see ravens sitting on the telephone poles as if they’d been planted just for the convenience of ravens.
Slowly color begins to emerge, gray greens and bloodless tans. Up in the mountains the river willows would look like a tartan now. Out here on the plains, they seem to be blushing furiously but only by contrast with the immense drabness that surrounds them. It’s only a mood, I know, only a wan hour of morning that makes their beauty feel so hidden, so lost.
And then there’s the question of what emerges last. One answer is the pronghorn. I pass a small band standing right by the fence line—the sun well up now behind the overcast—and they’re barely discernible, almost without dimension, as though they’d been camouflaged for just this light. But the last thing to emerge in the dawn is a red heeler dog trotting toward me in the brush along the ditch. He looks up at my headlights as if I were lost and he was the way home. I hope he isn’t lost and keep myself from turning back. The day is now up in central Wyoming, and I feel suddenly as if I’m merely microscopic, driving across the fawn-colored hide of a great beast.
March 23
Lately, I’ve been studying celestial navigation, the seafaring kind that requires a sextant, a chronometer, and a nautical almanac. It’s a way of adding a little trigonometry to a life that’s mostly addition and subtraction. I began this project just as spring arrived and quickly noticed that spring, to navigators, isn’t so much a season as a point. Spring occurs, in the nautical sense, between two lines of numbers in a large book that’s crowded with lines of numbers.
There’s more to it than that, which is one of the basic rules of celestial navigation. Spring is the vernal equinox—one of the two points of intersection between the ecliptic and the celestial equator. (The other is the autumnal equinox.) It’s also the moment when the sun reaches what’s called the First Point of Aries, a fictional line of demarcation that happens now to be in Pisces. I’m not going to try to explain these things, since I’m just beginning to grasp them myself. This much seems to be true. Spring is many things, most of them mathematical when you’re on a boat looking up at the sky, wondering where you are.
In the nautical almanac, spring comes like clockwork, whether the snow has withdrawn or is falling fast. The table of hour angles and declinations that pinpoints celestial spring seems to say, “Here it is, just where it always was. Make what you will of it.” And then there’s terrestrial spring, which is a matter of hints and wishes, promise and hope, a season only vaguely calendrical. On the first day of spring, I was driving along the Shields River in Montana looking out at a season called “calving.” It was nearly over. Most of the new calves—Angus nearly all of them—wore ear tags and moved with confidence. Some chased each other across the fields and around their sober dams, as though they could never grow up to be that stolid. A few seemed already businesslike, thuggish, looking across the fence line at a wider world.
But along the edge of one creek bottom ranch, a cow had just given birth, the umbilical still trailing from her as she tried to lick her calf to its feet. It rose and stumbled. The cow seemed both agitated and patient, eager to have her calf on its feet beside her but somehow certain it would be soon. I moved down the road, because there were other things for her to think about besides me. On a tree in the next pasture there were six bald eagles, waiting. There were ravens on the fence and magpies in the ditch. Their young were yet to come.
April 25
Nine Angus bulls are moving down the fence line in a pasture along Clear Creek, north central Wyoming. I can see only their backs, black and as powerfully angled as the mounded coal in the hopper cars running north to Montana. There’s a man on horseback ahead of the bulls and another behind them. They turn the bulls out onto the asphalt just at the highway crossroads.
To use an old word, it’s a viridescent day. The cottonwoods stopped moaning in the rain overnight. Every creature is suddenly addled with the season. A pair of sandhill cranes stand motionless against the hills. A bald eagle circles higher and higher. A tom turkey works the fence line, making Kabuki moves, his eye on some invisible hen. The deer are trapped in their winter coats, looking disreputable. The air is full of the ticking of red-winged blackbirds, full of the soft spring sun.
But what I hear myself thinking is, “The bulls are out.” They make for Clearmont then change their minds. They head toward me, the Sheridan way, before the riders veer them off, whooping and swinging stiff team-roping loops. The bulls are not belligerent, only confused. They don’t know the question they’re being asked, much less the answer. The correct direction is toward Buffalo, and soon the nine are strung out in an amiable line along the ditch, snatching mouthfuls of grass as they make their way down the road.
My worst dreams are the ones in which the horses or pigs get out. I like tight fences and good working gates. I like to see animals with deep grass and their heads down in it, grazing contentedly. I think I share my sense of order with those nine Angus bulls, who are being driven from home with too many choices. They go the right way at last just to calm the men on horseback.
The road stretches for miles into the low hills in ev
ery direction. The fences are tight, all the gates closed but two: the one the bulls came from and the one where they’re heading. There’s nothing but pasture and creek bottom, nothing but green grass and highway and the sound of birdsong. There was no getting out for those bulls. They crest a hill to the west, and I can feel the whooping and hollering inside me dying down.
May 16
Nearby, I can hear the sound of the 10, a waterfall of asphalt and rubber. A helicopter putters past overhead, and there’s the sudden, tubular flare of a motorcycle—a big one—climbing the on-ramp just a few blocks away. Mockingbirds swoop from fence to wire down the long line of backyards in this part of town, and the small, gray bird nesting in an angle of my porch-roof has bedded down with her eggs for the night. The twilight sky has reached the moment when, if I could, I’d break a shard from it and keep it in my pocket to light my way in the darkness.
Meanwhile, up in the village, every restaurant is full, every corner crowded. Claremont, California, is a college town, and the parents have arrived for graduation. They’ve put their simulacra through college, and now they’re all dining out in a haze of anticipatory nostalgia. I know the feeling. I graduated from this place—Pomona College—a long time ago, and I remember seeing so many adults who looked eerily like their younger selves. I remember the nostalgia too.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 22