I’ve never had children, and so for me there’s something a little extra in coming to semester’s end with the students I’ve taught. Week by week, I watch their thoughts get clearer and clearer until suddenly my students are able to say things we can no longer quite account for. One by one, they come into focus, to me and to each other, in their writing. Just why this should be such a beautiful thing I’ve never figured out, unless perhaps it’s this. Even at their age, they carry such a weight of life. They’re such experts in the particulars of their circumstances. They have the strange and impermanent gift of not knowing how much they know.
One by one, I’ve talked to my students about what comes next. There are plans, places. Beijing, France, Woods Hole, London. Schools of every kind, and every kind of service, as well. One by one, my students express their longing and their sense of loss as they get ready to leave this place. I tell them to keep in touch, to write and send me what they’re writing. I’m the constant one. I’m now a voice in their heads, a voice that will sound surprisingly familiar to them the next time we talk. Yet only a few of them will keep up the uneven acquaintance of professor and student, which is just as it should be.
What I get in return is the knowledge of who they are at this very moment. I get to see, through the writing they’ve done for me, how life appears to them just now. And looking at my students, I can only wonder who I was all those years ago, on this same night, this one final evening. But I’m long forgotten, even to myself. Tomorrow, I leave this place like everyone else, and what I’ll think of is that nest in the porch-roof and how the last light shone through the orange leaves before I sat down to write.
June 5
The birds begin. Ethel the Border terrier stretches and yawns beside me. I listen for a while, then consult the time. It’s so much earlier than I thought—5:11 and nothing to do about it except listen for a little longer, then get up. I have the brief, puritanical thought that I should know all these birds by their songs. Perhaps they’re the same birds I hear at twilight, some of whose names I know.
I’ve been away from the farm for longer than I care to think, away from the work and the mental habit of it. And yet on this first morning home, I find myself stepping out the door at 5:30. Ethel comes first, her walk and breakfast, and then it’s down to the barn to let the horses out of the night corral. They pause in the barnyard, always—I like to think—with a sense of delinquency. I come out of the barn with a screen door that needs rescreening and startle the horses up the drive and into the pasture, where they settle to grazing.
I have an endless list of tasks. I begin by lopping a pair of hickory saplings that are crowding a Parrotia persica, which has sprung into adolescence since I last saw it. I’ll have to do something about a worn-out piston shaft on the mower. The bees are spilling out of the hive, but before I can inspect it, I have to fix the fence post that’s leaning against it.
What’s missing is new life. It’s all around me, but I mean the life of husbandry. I came back to the farm via Wyoming and a place I know with a small herd of dairy goats. One was due to deliver, and I became completely absorbed in the goat-watch. She had reached her term—150 days—and hour by hour her behavior and conformation changed. I marveled at her readiness, her deep knack, the timing of it all.
Only my timing was wrong. I was on the road when her twins were born. They’re females, and I hope to have a couple of their kids. They were on my mind when the birds began this morning. Over my coffee, I dog-eared the pages of a fencing catalog.
June 26
Thirty-five years ago, almost to the day, I made the same drive I’m making now, rising out of California and crossing Nevada on my way east. I was leaving home for graduate school and a future whose shape I couldn’t begin to guess.
My dad chose the Plymouth Valiant I was driving. It had a shimmy at sixty-two miles per hour, and I had no faith in its radiator, for radiators had often failed our family. Climbing the Golconda Summit, I watched the needle in the temperature gauge climb, too. We crested the summit—the Valiant and I—just below boiling point.
It’s hard to imagine the world in which that car was new. I think now of all the things I traveled without—credit card, cell phone, iPod, audiobooks—and the experience seems almost Conestogal, though it was anything but. The temptation is to jump to the end of the story—safe arrival in Princeton and the years since. But, as always, it’s the passage that matters.
What I think about now is what I didn’t feel then about the landscape I was crossing. I was just back from a year in London, and my head was stuffed with Dante and Virgil. It would never have occurred to me that if America is a kid bound across country for graduate school, it’s also a pair of horses and a pipe corral in an indigo valley with a dust devil whirling up in the Nevada distance.
Now I wonder why, in 1975, I didn’t turn off in the Starr Valley or make my way down into the Ruby Mountains and settle under the stars for a few nights, or perhaps for a lifetime. I wonder that even as I pass up the opportunity again. Turning north at Wells, I realize that I’m retracing an even older route—the road my family took when we moved to California from Iowa in 1966. As I bask in the late light on Route 93, heading toward Twin Falls, Idaho, I imagine passing a 1963 Ford Galaxie with two adults and four kids heading the opposite direction. Another hour, and I’m in Idaho, dropping down into well-watered valleys where the hay has just been cut and baled, hay of an almost theological quality standing in perfect, square bales, waiting to be stacked for winter.
July 2
I’m just home from a solo drive across country, accompanied by my thoughts and the implacable songs of Lori McKenna. I didn’t solve any problems, for all my thinking, but I did a lot of looking. And, to use the wonderful old phrase, I’ll tell you what. In America the rivers are full—the Yellowstone, the Cheyenne, the Missouri, the Rock, the Mississippi. They reach up into the boughs of the trees overarching them and sweep their shadows away downstream.
And everywhere I looked, all across the mountains and the plains, I saw grass of a kind you see only perhaps once in a generation, so thick and lustrous that it looks as though it had the texture of a beaver pelt. The high-pressure dome above me scattered the winds, sending the sunlight skittering over the grasses as though they were ripples on the waves at sea.
The cattle and horses were sleek and almost fatigued with good feeding. In western South Dakota, cows stood belly deep in a ranch pond, impersonating the kine in Constable’s paintings. In the eastern part of the state, I came across an old barn sinking, prow high, in the ocean of grass.
I wanted to pull over and lie down in the thick of those pastures, watching the seeded heads of the grasses bending low in the wind above me. But I drove on, and noticed that northern Iowa, where silos were once the only tall landmarks on the horizon, has now given itself a certain grandeur by building towering windmills, mostly in pods of six.
On a trip this long, the driving sometimes grows weary. And yet rather than listening to books as I’ve done in the past, I found myself making up stories about characters based on the names on the exit signs I passed. My favorite, in eastern Iowa, is Galva Atkinson. In my mind she’s tough as a pump handle but has cornflower eyes. In Illinois, I came across the wellborn but feckless Niles Plymouth. In Ohio, I contemplated the lovely Lorain Ferry, and in New York, at last, the sterling Frankfort Ilion, who was once a classicist but has since become a banker. And so, finally, all the way home again.
August 16
By the time I’ve made the first few passes across the middle pasture, the barn swallows have found me out. They come chiding out of the hayloft when I appear at the barn door but lose interest once I drive the tractor up the road. I make the turn into the pasture—bucket raised high to clear the gate—and send power to the big mower trailing behind me. The tractor shudders, and I shift into third, mower blades thrumming. Down go the burdock and milkweed and curly dock.
Down go the thistles.
I come to the patches that give me particular pleasure—cutting across the hillside where wild strawberries grow or mowing the high, rank grasses out near the pond hole that never fills. But where the pleasure really comes from is hard to say. Is it the way the green of the pasture lusters up once it’s mowed? Is it just the spreading neatness? Whatever it is, it feels jubilant, a jubilation embodied by swallows.
I mow alone at first. A vole slips out of a deep tuft of grass and runs to safety. A rabbit streaks out of the brambles. As I work my way through the thickest growth, a cloud of insects rises around me. Now there’s one swallow with me; now there are two. And soon I can no longer count them, not because they’re so many but because they’re so fast.
I’m at the center of the insect cloud, and the swallows vector closer and closer. I can visualize them only in fragments—a rufous waistcoat, scything wings, the bluebottle back. Their flight is merciless, joyous. There’s no athleticism here. This is merely life and death.
What I can’t convey is the abruptness of the swallows’ flight, the way they make me feel almost stationary. They dodge in and out of my periphery, as if the real game here were never to let me see them straight on. I cut the last swaths and turn for the barn, leaving the swallows at work behind me. I back the tractor in, kill the diesel, ease the hydraulics. A lone insect—a mothlike being—rises from my shoulder, and makes for the open air.
September 2
One day, I can hear the faint rustle of autumn coming. The next day I can’t. One evening, summer leaks away into the cool night sky, and the next morning, it’s back again. But there’s headway through the season. Birdsong has gone, replaced by the bagpiping of the insect creation. I look out across the pasture as dusk begins and see a shining galaxy of airborne bugs. How would it be, I wonder, to have an awareness—a sentient feel—of the actual number of insects on this farm?
I ask myself a version of that question every day: “Have you ever really looked at...?” You can fill in the blank yourself. But every day I feel blinded by familiarity. I open the hive, which is filled with honey, and what I see are honeybees. Their particularity, even their community, escapes me, if only because I’ve been living with honeybees a good part of my life. I remember the old phrase “keep your eyes peeled,” and maybe that’s what I need, a good peeling, so all my senses revert to their original freshness.
Again and again, I find myself trying to really look at what I’m seeing. It happened the other afternoon, high on a nearby mountain. A dragonfly had settled on the tip of a pine bough. It clung, as still as only a dragonfly can be. Then it flicked upward and caught a midge and settled on the bough again, adjusting itself precisely into the wind. I see dragonflies quivering through the insect clouds above my pasture too. And what I always notice is that there’s no such thing as really looking.
What I want to be seeing is invisible anyway—the prehistoric depth of time embodied in the form of those dragonflies, the pressure of life itself, the web of relations that binds us all together. I find myself trying to witness the moment when the accident of life becomes a continued purpose. But this is a small farm, and, being human, I keep coming up against the limits of what a human can see.
This morning I found a spider resting on the leaf of an oakleaf hydrangea, the axis of the spider’s abdomen perfectly aligned with the axis of the leaf. What I noticed was the symmetry of their placement, the way spider and leaf resembled each other. What I wanted to notice was the spider’s intent. If I could, I would have asked it, “What are you doing?” Or, better yet, “Who are you?” But all I could do was look—and notice that I was looking—and make the best of the sight I’d seen.
September 17
Why does the mounded hay in the horses’ run-in shed look so inviting? Why does the chicken house feel like a clubhouse to me?—warm and tight and brightly lit, food and water and grit all at hand, a place where I could just settle in with the birds and enjoy the mild superiority of being human. I climb the ladder to the hayloft and the barn cat watches me warily from his redoubt in the hay bales. I feel like getting my sleeping bag and joining him.
Night comes, but the fog comes first, dragging the last light with it across the hilltops. The trees are bristling in a light breeze, and already the leaves have started to fall—just ones and twos so far, but already scorched into color by autumn. It’s still too warm for the woodstove, the kind of evening that feels like summer in mourning, though without any real sadness. On a night like this, “grieving” sounds like the noise the wind would make if it got into the attic.
Real autumn is a long way off yet, no matter what the pumpkins say. They’re starting to edge out the sweet corn at farm stands along the highway, their brightness almost preposterous in the fading light. I find myself wishing they weren’t such emblems of Halloween, because the sight of them seems to jerk me six weeks forward. I’m not ready to be jerked forward in time. I want to consume the particulars of the day ahead of me one by one.
This is what I always say, and yet life never lets me mean it. I was away from the farm for two days this week, and it sprang ahead without me. The bees, uproarious around the hive-mouth when I left, are nowhere to be seen in the dusk, though I know they’ll be out again in the morning.
I can’t conceive what it means to be a bee. I don’t know whether their labor feels like labor or whether necessity is joy to them. But I never walk past the hive without passing through a plume of honey-scent. And I never see the bees coming and going without wondering what so much kinship means.
Can they tell how tightly knit they are? Or is kinship to them as fundamental as gravity—the precondition of their existence? What I know is that I loved the education Merlin gives the young King Arthur in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which was to be turned into one creature after another. I teach myself the same way every day I’m at the farm.
October 15
It’s well before light, and I’m listening to the rain, watching every now and then the flicker of headlights coming down the hill. I no longer have custody of Ethel the Border terrier, so I’m up early on my own. She was itemized in a divorce settlement and now lives in Iowa, where I know she’s happy. I hope she misses me, but I hope not nearly as much as I miss her.
Without her my attention seems to have spilled outward. I can feel the day coming and how different its rhythms are. Somehow there’s more time for the horses, which is perhaps why Nell the mustang let me catch her when the farrier came the other day. At first she shied away, just to keep up appearances. But when the other horses had been trimmed she presented herself to my arms, and it was a much more beautiful day after that.
I have new chickens, layers eight weeks old. When they were chicks living under lights in the mudroom, I made a practice of picking them up one at a time, those that would let me. And now when I enter the poultry yard, I feel like a one-man midway at the chicken fair, birds standing in line waiting to be picked up. No good can come of lifting chickens. I can almost hear my dad thinking that, though he’s gone now, too. And yet the birds churr and cluck, and I leave the yard happy.
The chicken house my dad and I built in the days after 9/11 has begun to sink on one end, thanks to the woodchucks. That gave me an excuse to buy a bottle jack, which I’ll slip under the sill and jack the house back to level. That will make the place feel more trim, and it will keep water from running out of the chicken waterers, which matters once the freeze begins.
It’s hard to explain where happiness comes from when so much has been lost and misplaced and set aside. But come it does. This is one of those mornings when I think I have a farm just to surround me while I work. I have this piece to finish and later there will be time for my new book. The chickens will be darting in and out of the rain, the fall of hickory nuts will continue, and the horses will stand around an upended round bale in the run-in shed on the hill, looking for all the
world as though they’ve got a game of three-handed pinochle going.
November 5
Just about now, I remember that the trees on this farm will be bare for the next six months. It always comes as a surprise. I’m surrounded by a hibernating forest. The maples and hickories have mulched themselves with their own leaves, and they seem to have gone rigid now that they carry so much less sail in the wind. Everything that can die back has done so. The last of the woodchucks have gone down their burrows. The tide of dormancy is rising all around me, and on a rainy day with the woodstove going, I wonder whether I’ll sink or swim.
Even as the rain falls again and the temperature hovers in the forties, I can feel January in the back of my mind. I try hard to keep it out of my thoughts, as if incredulity might guarantee a mild winter. By the time the hard cold gets here I’ll be inured to it, having haired up in my mind the way the horses are doing right now. But truthfully, I’m still back in mid-August somewhere, before the barn swallows vanished, before the pokeweed berries were ripe enough for the cedar waxwings, before the chipmunks gorged on the dogwood drupes.
This month more than any other, I slip in and out of season, never able to coincide with the calendar. I feel the slippage most when I’m indoors working, my thoughts almost anywhere but where I am. Where I am is facing south, looking into the tree-tops under a sky that’s more than overcast. It’s a squirrel-gray sky, a beech-bark sky, a sky as dark as a horseshoe right out of the box. It’s no wonder my thoughts drift away.
But soon I’ll put on my barn coat and work gloves and muck boots. And the minute I step outside, I’ll step back into proper time. It feels as though the day suddenly sticks to me. The thought of January recedes because it’s so purely November, the mud deep in the barnyard, the rain picking up again. I walk down to the barn and stand just inside the doorway, taking shelter with the tractor and my tools and all the implements of summer—the spade, the garden fork, the pig fence, and the chicken fences.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 23