Year
ELEVEN
January 13
Here’s the thing about mice. They look at you with outrageous self-possession. I run across them everywhere on the farm, and they look up at me as if I’d just disrupted them in the act of reading a book in the privacy of their own home. Apart from the mice I find in traps and in the feed bin, I almost always come across them in their domesticity, a nest of shredded paper, fur, horsehair, or chicken feathers somewhere nearby. This week, I found a mouse living in the spare tire compartment of the car. It had turned the jack manual into a futon and was prepared to wait out the winter.
On their very small scale, the mice are working to return this house to nature, and I try my best to keep them from succeeding. It’s an unequal contest. I never carry hickory nuts into the house, but from time to time I find one hidden in the toe of a work boot. Some days I wish I could leave my paper recycling to the mice. They’d do a good job of it, shredding it into illegibility, warming generations of mice to come. Hickories would eventually sprout in the mudroom and basement, raising the roof beams as they grew. If only mice ate rust.
This is how it always feels at the farm, as though nature is trying to pull my habitation apart. The farm is temporary shelter at best, even though the house has been standing, in one form or another, for more than two centuries. Brambles tug at the fence wires. Soil rots the fence posts. Freeze and thaw work away at the stones in the foundation. Plants come tendriling over the railing and up the porch posts. Gravity does its insidious work. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the farm is slowly sliding downhill.
There’s no stasis, only change. And this winter, even the illusion of stasis—the deep cold, the settled snow—is missing. The sign at the farm supply store says, “Seeds Are In!” and everywhere I look I see people hoping to get the jump on spring while worrying that winter will get the jump on them. As for me, I write and read and do chores and whatever I can to stem the tide. I know that mice will be with us always.
March 8
There’s a boat in the barn. I put it there last October, and yet it surprises me every time I go down to get a bale of hay. A previous owner called it the Judy of Gloucester—still painted on the stern—but its manufacturer called it a Typhoon, a name I like to think was taken from the novel by Joseph Conrad. You can pack a lot of daydreams, plans, and illusions into a forty-year-old sailboat only nineteen feet long in a barn 140 miles from the sea. I see the boat in my barn and I think of the Lyle Lovett song about “me upon my pony on my boat,” a song that’s all about illusion.
When the weather warms up, I’ll begin restoring the Judy of Gloucester. It will be yet another of the things I’d never done until I came to this farm, like raising pigs. I imagine that one day I’ll be far out at sea remembering those pigs. Or perhaps I’ll be in the pigpen imagining all of us far out at sea together, like the pigs and the children on the pirate ship in Richard Hughes’s novel, A High Wind in Jamaica. I don’t know. It’s hard to say how it will all work out. I like walking the length of the mast, which is lying on sawhorses in the barn, before I feed the animals. It’s not exactly climbing into the crow’s nest, but it will do for now.
Meanwhile, this is still an upland farm in early March. At evening, a rim of light behind the birches divides the blue of sky from the blue of twilit snow. There’s a little summer, a little lingering, in that rim of light, but only for a moment. Then the rising moon runs across the pasture, and it’s winter again. In the moon’s light, the snow-worn hill by the barn looks like an old Appaloosa lying on its side, barely breathing, slowly shedding, its white flank blotched and speckled with dark.
When I was young, my father bought me the cheapest old car he could find, in hopes that restoring it would take my mind off other things. We parked it in the garden and put the front end up on blocks. I never did restore that car, but I used to sit in it, angled toward the sky, when the moon was high. I haven’t yet taken to sitting in the cockpit of the Judy, pretending to be a-sail when everything around me says I’m not. But I’m sure that day will come.
March 30
On fair days, I’ve been letting the chickens have the run of the farm. I come out of the house, and the birds are waiting at the chicken-yard fence like petitioners in Dostoevsky, but with boundless optimism instead of resignation and despair. I open the gate, and out they come, all thirty of them, except for the hens who are busy laying. It’s a flock of many breeds—Appenzeller, Penedesenca, Orpington, Campine. They sound like the great, exploring sailors of a much earlier time, the discoverers of straits and continents.
I let them out because it so plainly makes them happy, and because their optimism is catching. Now and then a Welsummer or a Barnevelder strolls onto the deck and walks up to the sliding glass door. The chickens and I—and Ceilidh the Border terrier—look at each other with heads askew. The birds gaze into the house with one eye, then the other—they live in a monocular world, after all—and decide there’s nothing of interest there. Then we all go back to work. I, at least, am happier for the encounter.
Why do I like these birds so much? It’s not just the eggs and beautiful feathering, the crowing and the clucking. It’s the instinctive chicken-ness of their behavior, the boundary, in every movement, between what’s chicken and what’s not. A hen raking backwards through winter’s duff is a professional at work. Scratch, scratch, look around for predators, and what have we here? A foraging chicken feeds itself by finding surprises everywhere. It’s such a bountiful view of the world.
And yet the eye of every chicken—even the calmest and most buxom of hens—is inherently skeptical. They seem poised between doubt and trust, never jaundiced, never dismayed. The world seems perfectly adjusted to their expectations. They take the world just as it is.
Light falls, and Ceilidh and I go out to do chores. I feed the horses and the chickens run among their legs looking for spilled grain and hayseeds. Everywhere, there are signs of their raking, leaves and plant-litter overturned. Before long, the birds are back in their yard, vanishing up the ramp to their house, all but the roosters, who keep a wary eye until the flock is in.
April 18
Doing without mud season shouldn’t feel like a loss. Who misses mud? But here we are, coasting toward the end of April, and I haven’t lost a boot to the suction of the barnyard swamp. I haven’t had to cut drainage channels through the corral. Nor have I had to tractor through hub-deep primeval ooze while hauling a round bale to the run-in shed.
Forsythia and mud nearly always coincide. The mud persists even as the azaleas begin to blossom all over the county in a hideous color that might be called Importuning Pink. Usually, the mud abates as the tulips fade and the lilacs come out. In a well-drained garden, mud season makes it easy to do your spading, whether you plant your potatoes on Good Friday, as my uncle always does, or are merely preparing the earth for tomatoes to come.
What we have this year is intractable stuff, hard, powdery, and, lacking moisture, too light in color. What rain has fallen has barely laid the dust, and even a good storm now—a soaker—wouldn’t raise the kind of mud I’ve come to expect over the years. Mud season is more complex than that. It needs frozen ground, good snowpack, and a sudden thaw. The mud of mud season isn’t merely waterlogged dirt. It’s upheaval, the amphibian earth changing shape before your eyes. It’s the seed of spring in the corpse of winter.
Just now the maples carry immature leaves that look like small, folded bat wings, if bat wings were chartreuse. The metasequoia along the fence line is preparing to jump another foot or two in height. All the conifers are showing the first bright green of their intentions. Only the hickories—always late to the party—pretend that this ebullience is folly. Spring has to prove itself before a hickory will come into leaf.
It’s the between time, even without enough mud to say so. The night-song of the peepers has faded, but the Canada goslings haven’t hatched
. Robins are here, but no catbirds or swallows. Goldfinches wear their breeding colors, but phoebes aren’t yet nesting over the kitchen door. In the garden, the chives have a long head start on the asparagus. Mars is now high above, Orion subsiding, when Ceilidh the Border terrier and I take our last walk at night. We look at the sky, we sniff the air, and when we come back in our feet are perfectly dry.
May 20
I resent my lawn. It grows in the night. Right now, it’s deep enough to hide a rabbit. I’ve thought about cutting paths through it, letting the rest of it grow wild. But lawn is more than a cultural legacy. It’s a sensory legacy—the smell of cut grass and gas fumes, the geometric symmetry the mower leaves behind. As a kind of landscape art, it’s just one step short of plowing. And yet it’s a legacy I wish I’d never inherited.
I have no neighbors to tut over my unmowed lawn. The other organisms on the farm seem to love it. Ceilidh and I walk around the house at first light, and she grazes as she goes, dew gathering on her face. A turkey feeds beneath the apple trees. The unevenness of the grass gives spiders a richer undergirding for their webs. Another week and what I do when I mow won’t be lawn care. It will be forestry.
Lawn seems especially arbitrary here. Beyond the fence it’s pasture. And yet when I mow the pasture it doesn’t become lawn. And if I parked one of the horses on the lawn, it wouldn’t become pasture. The difference lies in the mixture of species. Lawn is meant to be monoculture, pasture not. Here the two converge.
Lawn mowing—like driving—is one of those long strands that reaches all the way back through my life. If anything, mowing is more primal. It’s what young boys in small towns are supposed to do when they’re not delivering newspapers. The most prosperous boys in my boyhood town—crew-cut twins and Future Farmers of America—ran a mowing business with mowers that gleamed like tiny new combines. When we moved to California, we discovered the true idolatry of lawn. In California, they edged the lawns. No one had heard of such a thing in Iowa.
I’ll give it up, the lawn, and let the ferns and wild mint take over. But like so much else in our culture, lawn is a terribly hard habit to break. All the more because when I mow, I see the farms I knew as a child. Out in the fields, my uncles are driving their tractors, plowing. My aunts are all on riding mowers, zooming around the hydrangeas, the house, and the edge of the grove.
June 19
In early May, my neighbor and I moved my three horses across the gravel road to her summer pasture. Last year, it took a while before her animals—a thoroughbred and a mule—herded up with mine, but eventually they settled down into a single unit. This year, they did something unexpected. They ejected Remedy from the herd. My neighbor put salve on his bites. When I went to check on him the next morning, I found him standing alone in the shallow creek, as if his feet were hot. His head was to the fence, his tail to all the rest of the world.
I bought Remedy in Colorado when he was nineteen. Now he’s thirty-four. He has ruled all the horses as long as I’ve owned him, wherever we’ve been, but not anymore. I walked him out of the creek and back to my place and put him in a paddock out of sight of the horses across the road. He was limping slightly, but now that limp has hardened into a deep and permanent hitch in his gait. He gets around as though he’s used to the damage, but his orbit in the paddock has grown smaller and smaller. His eyes are bright. His coat gleams. His ears seem to have lengthened as he’s aged, but they still twitch with attention.
Remedy has always been the youngest old horse I know, but thirty-four is terribly old for a horse. A wise equestrian friend told me that Remedy would let me know when he’s ready to go. I’ve seen that moment in dogs and humans and known it for what it was, but never in a horse. I’m afraid I won’t recognize it, that I’ll let him down in dying. He’s been such a powerful figure in my life, the remedy to a disabling fear that stole upon me unexpected one day. He has one more thing to teach me, and I hope I learn it well.
July 19
By the time you read this, I will have filled in Remedy’s grave. The vet is coming Friday. I’d promised myself not to write about this, but then I met the man with the backhoe who’s digging the grave. His name is Digger, lean, gray, wearing his spectacles low on his nose. I showed him the spot I had in mind in the lower garden. I asked him how much I’d owe him. His answer caught me deep inside. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for free all my life.”
I’ve kept this coming loss at a distance for as long as I can, said all the things you can say about an injured thirty-four year old horse and his time to go. They sound like compassion and common sense intertwined. But I wasn’t prepared for the subtle, feeling gift Digger is giving me down in the lower garden as I write. I expected that Remedy would be himself right up till the end. I know, in the best sense, what to expect from horses. Digger reminded me that I don’t always know what to expect from humans.
There’s been a lot of dying on this farm. That’s the nature of living with domesticated animals on the edge of the wild—and with pigs. The deaths add up over the years. I’ve seen again and again how forceful and how frail life is. Before I cover Remedy’s body, I’ll scatter the ashes of Buster, Angus, Tavish, and Darcy in the grave. The first few chickens that died, years ago, were sentimental losses. But sentimentality washes away, and then you come to the bedrock of grief.
The part I hate is that every death brings with it every other death, going all the way back through my life. In my experience, there’s no segregating grief by species. Losing Remedy sets all the other losses echoing, animal and human alike. What differs isn’t the feeling of grief itself—it’s the afterlife. With pets—and pigs—there’s an unalloyed incandescence. It’s always more intense than I expect, but it also burns out quickly. With humans—well, you’ll have to write your own sentence here. All I know is that when the vet comes tomorrow and her work is done, I’ll be surrounded by the memory of everyone I’ve ever lost.
Coda
August 4
The other night I took the dogs for a walk in the pasture. It was a cloudless evening with low humidity, a rare event in this damp, northeastern summer. I always look at the stars when I’m outside in the dark, but all too often they’re obscured by haze, even here in the country. Not that night. Cassiopeia, Corona Borealis, Lyra, the red light of Arcturus in the west, the diffuse band of the Milky Way arching overhead—their presence was overwhelming. And yet somehow when the stars look close to Earth it’s easier to imagine how far away they really are. It was a warm July night, but I could almost feel the chill of space.
I’ve been watching the stars for nearly half a century now. Not much has changed up there. The sky is a memory in itself. I stared at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through a small telescope of my own when I was a boy in Iowa. I spent part of a summer watching meteors while I was helping my family build a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and part of a winter stargazing from the top of a mesa on the Hopi Reservation, where somehow the smell of cedar mingled with the light of the moon. The only thing that has changed in all that time—apart from a few new satellites crossing the sky—is the state of my knowledge.
The same could be said for the whole of humanity. Besides a supernova here and there or a comet fluttering past, the night sky visible to the naked eye has barely changed as long as our species has been looking at it, unlike the stories we use to describe what we see up there. Each human culture, separate in time or place, has lived under a different celestial roof. The metaphors for the heavens have changed over time, but not nearly as much as what we know about the universe itself.
· · ·
Usually, the dates in the history of science seem abstract, almost equidistant in the past: 1543, 1632, 1905—it’s all ancient history. But this time, I found myself weighing the dates of various discoveries—the ones that define our present idea of the age and dimensions of the universe—against the time-scale o
f my own life. I tried to picture what the universe looked like—or was thought to look like—around the year my dad was born, 1926, or the year I was born, 1952. I’m overwhelmed by the recentness of what we know.
Take something “everybody knows.” Earth belongs to the solar system, and the solar system belongs to a galaxy called the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years across. The Milky Way is one of perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing perhaps a hundred billion stars. But until 1925, many astronomers believed, on the available evidence, that the Milky Way contained the whole of the observable universe, and that ours was thus the only galaxy. Astronomers had seen and cataloged plenty of galaxies—they were called nebulae in those days—but there was no way to know how far away they were.
In 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a Cepheid variable star in the nebula called Andromeda. Thanks to Henrietta Leavitt’s research on these stars, Hubble was able to calculate the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, as we call it now. It was vastly more distant than anyone had guessed. By his calculations, Andromeda was 900,000 light-years away—well outside the Milky Way. In a sense, Hubble had turned the universe inside out.
Hubble was wrong about one thing. Andromeda is 2.2 million light years away, not 900,000. You can see it with the naked eye if you look just below and to the right of the constellation Cassiopeia on a dark, clear night. It’s worth knowing that in another three billion years Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way. “Violently intersift” is perhaps a better way of putting it.
To a casual naked-eye observer on Earth it makes no practical difference whether the universe is the size of the Milky Way or much, much bigger. In fact, it makes little difference whether we’re looking up at stars scattered across empty space or at an empyrean of concentric crystalline spheres. The night sky overhead would look the same.
More Scenes from the Rural Life Page 26