Their absence will give me a chance to do some refencing and to take down a couple of dead trees. I plan to cut up all my rotting post and rail fences into stove-lengths, which I’ll cheerfully burn this winter. I can do some reseeding, and if I had a flock of sheep, I’d turn them loose in my pastures to eat the plants my horses won’t eat. I imagine the whole farm shaking itself like a shaggy dog while the horses are across the road.
I wonder, too, how I’ll take this move. The horses will be only a hundred yards up the road but mostly out of sight. The more I think about it, the more I realize how often I look at the horses, dozens of times a day. I gaze at them as steadily as they gaze at their neighbors across the road, and they communicate something to me every time I see them. Exactly what is hard to say, but they draw me out of myself again and again. My thoughts turn into the cowbirds wandering among the horses’ hooves.
I look forward to walking up the road to see how the horses are doing, to see how the new herd is settling down. Will they be grazing in the far reaches of the new pasture? Or will they stand, all five of them, by the roadside fence, gazing back across the road at my empty pastures, wondering how this monumental change came to be?
June 14
Last week, the wind pulled apart a sugar maple on the edge of the pasture. It left a long, tapering wound on the side of the trunk, and on the ground a forking branch the size of a mature maple. Late one afternoon I began disassembling it with a chainsaw. I loaded my tools—saw, sharpener, logging chain, gas and oil—in the tractor bucket and put on my hearing protectors—orange plastic ear muffs—for the drive. Before I started the saw, I switched to a helmet with a face guard and built-in ear muffs.
I live in my own world on this farm, but when I put on hearing protectors I retreat to an even own-er world. Time after time, I’ve stepped off the tractor and started on some project without remembering to take off the muffs. I concentrate on what I’m doing and yet my thoughts go walkabout. Then I become aware of the pulmonary tide of my own breathing and realize I’m still wearing orange plastic ear muffs. Often as not, I choose to leave them on. I find it hard to explain why.
The best answer, I suppose, is that they heighten my sense of self-absorption, the feeling of dwelling in a task completely apart from the world I usually work in. But they also help me hear my body as it bends to the task, even as they distance me, aurally, from the task itself—the roaring of the chainsaw, the ringing of the T-post I’m pounding, the screaming of the table saw. And when they come off, it’s like leaving self-consciousness behind and reentering the stream of events. I back the tractor into the barn, shut it down, and hang the ear muffs over the hydraulic lever. The first thing I hear is the barn swallows chastening me.
Years ago, this house had loose, single-pane windows. When the wind blew, they rattled and moaned. It was like living in the tree-tops. The windows have been replaced and now when a thunderstorm comes crashing in from the west, it spills its winds silently. I’m glad to be spared that sound, glad to wait it out in silence and discover what fell and what broke only after a good night’s sleep.
June 30
Last week, there was a day I hesitate to call perfect only because I’d hate it if the truly perfect day had already come and gone in my life. I’d like it to remain somewhere ahead in my reckoning. But when that perfect day comes it will probably resemble the one last week. The western breeze had cleaned the sun and purified the light, which fell mote-less on the farm.
I recognized the day. It’s the one that’s inconceivable in midwinter. It’s also the one in which midwinter itself is inconceivable—an antipodal day. The hive entrances were yellow with the pollen rubbed off as bees came and went, jodphured with the stuff. It was a woodchuck day too—all of them out, heads high, looking like grass-otters. As I walked up from the barn, a pair of blonde kit foxes—raised on my April chickens—spilled out of the culvert and scampered up the fence line.
Life—the thrust of living—seems raw and irrepressible on a day like that. Every niche, no matter how small, is fully occupied, no-vacancy signs visible everywhere. At dawn I walk through one spider trap after another, trailing silk by the time I get to the barn. Any object I move, I discover a colony of creatures behind it or under it or inside it. This is a farm of overlapping settlements and empires, and I plod through like Godzilla, undoing the work of the ant and earwig nations just by moving a five gallon bucket or a fence rail.
Chaotic as the life here feels—profligate and squanderous—I take refuge in it. It’s what we have going for us—“we” meaning the kinship of all species. The strange part about being human is that “life” so easily comes to mean a quantity of time, an allotment of experience. We note that we’re alive without feeling that we are, for a time, indomitable organisms sharing a planet with indomitable organisms of every other kind.
These are pure-sun, western-breeze thoughts, steam rising from compost. But on the day I mean, it seemed like a toss-up. Either everything was sentient along with me, or we were all sharing a vital insentience. I sat in the shade watching the bees come and go in the sunshine a few feet away, a nectared, pollened, purposeful cloud. That was the kind of day it was.
July 28
While the horses have been on vacation—staying across the road in a neighbor’s pasture—my own pastures have grown into what looks like the first stage of abandonment. The grass is high, and so are the thistles and burdock. Here and there, sumac is trying to grow unnoticed. Several of the fences are down on purpose and in two of the pastures lie the trunks of dead sugar maples, cut into log lengths. They remind me of disjointed whale skeletons I saw on an island off the coast of southern Chile.
There’s a surprising pleasure in the absence of a fence that has stood in place for more than a decade. I walk back and forth across the former fence lines just because I can. It reminds me that most of the figuring I’ve done in my head while living here has had to do with the layout of fences. I wish, in a way, they didn’t have to go back up again. They may be my fences, but they constrain me as surely as they constrain the horses.
While the horses have been across the road, there’s been no need to close the gates here. Anyone with large animals becomes fastidious about closing gates. I can, with effort, leave open the main gate to the barn while I’m moving branches to the burn pile or hauling logs with the tractor. But if I look out from the house and see the gate still open, I’m flooded with a sense of disarray. I know it’s perfectly fine—the horses are behind other gates and other fences—and yet it feels as though something was left open in me.
So now it’s time for a last grand mowing—taking out the weeds before they go to seed, cutting back the sumacs, mowing the fence lines themselves—and then up go the fences again, tighter and truer. But not just yet. I want to walk across this borderless farm a few more times, trying to understand why it feels so odd going from garden to pasture without having to step between the wires of a horse fence. Living here is such a mysterious affair.
September 9
I realize about now that most of the projects I started last spring when the snow melted either need finishing before the snow falls again or are the kind that can never really be completed, like cleaning the barn. Let me not depress you with a list of them. All I know is that instead of pounding the posts I need for a new fence around the yard or getting the garden ready for next spring, I’ve been gazing idly at small sailboats for sale on the web.
What attracts me isn’t only the thought of sailing. It’s how self-contained these vessels look, everything from a smart racing dinghy to a Nor’Sea 27 that looks like it just returned from a circumnavigation. A sailboat has no barn. It has no compost pile. Mildew can be a problem but not nettles or Japanese knotweed. I suppose one could keep a chicken or two aboard. But I’d have to draw the line at pigs, though I know from nautical narratives that pigs have done their fair share of sailing. There are sails and standing
rigging to deal with and keeping the bottom barnacle-free, but can that be worse than stacking hay or splitting wood?
One thing holds me back. All the small sailboats I find myself looking at have trailers. That means they have tires. Nothing causes me more despair than seeing the condition of the tires on the trailers I already own. They rot in the rain and they rot in the sun. Oxygen seems to be bad for them. This is the trouble with even a small, avocational farm like mine. You set out to raise chickens and keep horses and end up with a collection of graying tires and small gas engines with fouled carburetors. Instead of looking at small sailboats I should be looking at oxen.
Perhaps the solution is to find a sailboat just too big to trailer. I can have it mounted on stands beside the barn, with a ladder reaching up to the cockpit. I’d light the cabin with kerosene and keep my sailing books and a few ragged mysteries on a simple wooden shelf. I might even hoist the jib and mainsail on quiet days. But mostly I’d go there when I need an escape from the farm I escaped to. I’d look up through the companionway and see the leaves turning, and I’d pretend not to hear the woodchucks whistling to each other.
October 7
Caterpillars have begun to appear outside my mudroom door. They look barely animate and thickly pelted, like moss creeping upward in individual inches. I wonder about the feel of black caterpillar fur, but some natural caution keeps me from touching them. Even so, they’re a great improvement over the slugs and millipedes that crept up the door all summer long. The slugs looked like thick, muddy drops of gelatinous rain. There’s no analogy for the millipedes.
Suddenly, after months of rain, there’s a bright sky overhead. The chickens lie prostrate in blobs of sun. The flight of ladybugs seeking crevices everywhere will be coming soon. The milkweed has blown, and the sun now sets in the southwest corner of the pasture. Among humans, there’s a sudden yearning for woodstove gaskets and logsplitters. We make last-minute calls to the chimney sweep, who’s already booked until yuletide. I hold off on lighting that first fire, because once it’s burning there’s no turning back from the season ahead. The smell of woodsmoke will lead me by the nose into winter.
There’s so much to be done, and yet it’s tempting just to sit in the sun and listen to the hickory nuts falling. A flight of sugar maple samaras has already landed, ahead of the leaves. Chipmunks stop the heavy work of hauling hickory nuts in order to eat a maple seed here and there. They look almost improvident while doing so, as if they too wanted to bask in the sun. But then I’ve never seen a relaxed chipmunk. Nor have I ever seen one walk. They dart or freeze.
Every evening at dusk, five turkeys come down into the pasture from the woods. They begin as substantial beings—still enough light for that—but soon they become shadows, ghosting slowly across the clover and rye. I wait for them every evening. They confirm something for me, though I don’t know what. They seem penitential, bringing a redeeming wildness with them.
I wish that when they catch sight of me, they’d stand and nod in my direction. But no. They lift their skirts and hasten through the gate until they find the spot far enough to resume their minute inspection of the pasture. I watch in hopes of being watched back.
November 10
Every now and then, I forget to turn off the lights in the barn, sometimes up in the hayloft, sometimes over the workbench or in a stall. I usually notice just before I go to bed, when the boundaries of the farm have drawn in close. That forgotten light makes the barn seem farther away than it really is—a distance I’m going to have to walk down and back before I can sleep. The weather makes no difference. Neither does the time of year.
I grew up in a landscape where nearly every farm had a yard light that shone all night long. I never understood why. Was it so a farmer, when he woke in the night, could look out at the tractor ruts or watch empty husks blowing past the corn crib? Was it to aid some wandering stranger? Or was it merely to posit one’s existence, compressed as those farms were between a prairie of soil and a prairie of sky?
I always hated those lights. They impoverished everything they shone on. Far better the farms that lay dark until a light went on in the dairy barn at an impossibly early hour, a light shrouded by spiderwebs in the windowframe, a light nearly the color of a Jersey cow’s milk. At that hour—no sign of dawn—it was impossible not to admire the quiet knowledge the cows carried with them. They would have milked themselves at that exact hour, and in that exact order, if they’d been able to and the humans in charge had overslept.
I don’t have cows, and I don’t have an all-night yard light either. Usually, after turning out that forgotten barn light, I sit on the edge of the tractor bucket and let my eyes adjust to the darkness outside. City people always notice the darkness here, but it’s never very dark if you wait till your eyes owl out a little. I carry a flashlight, but I leave it off until I check on the chickens. Then I let only the dimmest edge of its luminescence show me the hens. Any more, and they stir on their roosts, looking fearful and resentful all at once.
I’m always glad to have to walk down to the barn in the night, and I always forget that it makes me glad. I heave on my coat, stomp into my barn boots, and trudge down toward the barn light, muttering at myself. But then I sit in the dark and remember this gladness, and I walk back up to the gleaming house, listening for the horses.
November 23
“It’s raining,” I think—and wonder what “it” is that’s doing the raining. Ordinarily, that’s just a linguistic question. But on a cold November day, when woodsmoke sinks from the chimney, it feels like a philosophical problem. It makes no sense to say the clouds are raining. It makes no sense to speak of “clouds” at all when the sky is so solidly, grayly felted. Out in the pasture, the horses stand, hair slicked, a hind leg cocked on each of them. I conclude that what’s raining is the rain, a phrase that sounds like the opening of a grim, Anglo-Saxon lyric.
The trees are coming into their winter bareness. The fullness of their summer leaf seems almost imaginary now. The green they show is lichen on their branches. Against the hemlocks—dark as ever—the rain is obviously raining, falling in dim, straight lines. But the sugar maples on the far edge of the pasture have nothing to say about the rain, only the wind, which isn’t absent but lying down, waiting to stir. This is the time of year when all the houses come out of the woods, edging closer to the roads as if for company.
On a day like this my thoughts are never far from the chickens. The red heat lamps are on in the brooder house, and when chore-time comes I’ll look in through the window and watch the month-old chicks for a while before disturbing them with food and fresh water. One by one, they stand and stretch a wing and leg—the only balletic move a chicken makes—then settle back into the mass of bodies. They’re always seeking thermal equilibrium, clustering tighter and edging closer to the heat as the temperature drops, dispersing and drifting away as it rises.
I do the same inside my house, sitting close to the woodstove, writing. The fire burns clean and hot, but this is the kind of day when there’s sometimes a backdraft, a tuft of smoke venting out the air intake and into the kitchen with an audible puff. It rises and disperses leaving behind the scent of oak and maple burning, a scent so welcome and autumnal that it’s almost bacon to the nose. The rain rains, the writer writes, the chickens brood, and the horses stand in the mist of their breath, all of us getting along as best we can.
December 28
Some days this month it hasn’t been worth feeding the woodstove. The temperature hangs right at forty degrees like a picture on a nail. In October, forty feels like a reason to start a fire. Not in late December. But there’s something disheartening about a cold woodstove, as if it were a conduit for cold air and bad spirits. So I light it anyway, for the warmth, for the light, for the company, and so that when I go outside to do chores there will be that burgee of smoke blowing sideways from the chimney.
Watching the fire, I th
ink sometimes about two terrifying rooms in the basement of the Iowa farmhouse my dad grew up in. One was the coal room, the other the cob room. Coal went into the furnace, corncobs into the cookstove in the kitchen, but both rooms, when I first encountered them, had already fallen into disuse. In the coal room there was a darkness the eye couldn’t penetrate. Next door, the cobs had settled into a heap that hadn’t been disturbed in years. What frightened me I can no longer say, unless it was a glimpse into an abandoned way of living.
I think of it now because when I light the woodstove, I realize that I’m burning time. Handling the split logs, I notice their straightness or their irregularities. But when I feed them into the woodstove, I get one last, end-on glimpse of their tree rings. It’s like feeding chapters of a biological chronicle into the fire one by one. Some of the split logs I’m burning today are as old as the memory of that Iowa farmhouse. Some are older still. Wind scatters the smoke instantly, and when the woodstove is cold again, I’ll scatter the ashes.
There’s no special virtue in burning wood. It’s a way of keeping time in an otherwise hourless day. I have friends and neighbors who make an art of their woodpiles and kindling, whose mauls and axes are keen and bright. I used to think that one day I’d make a round Swedish woodpile, roofed with bark. What I have instead is a large, well-kept pile of things I used to think I’d do one day. It never rots. The chipmunks never nest in it. Every now and then, I actually do one of those things I thought I’d do one day. As it happens, sitting by the woodstove, burning time, is one of them.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 25