The Rural Life (10 page)

The way to look at it all was to accept its passing. To see something interesting you had to be looking right at it as it
flew by. If you didn’t see it, you wouldn’t see it, no matter how quickly you turned your head or how hard you looked back
down the road. There was no entanglement with the scenery. Sometimes a farmer would wave from the field or a woman from beside
a rural mailbox. Sometimes a driver coming the other way would raise a couple of fingers. That was it. In the far distance
the horizon slowly revolved while houses and outbuildings, cattle and soybeans, seemed to fling themselves past us along the
roadside, slowing only as we came to the outskirts of a town. A lot of us grew up that way.

But in this present life, I sometimes ride an old quarter horse named Remedy up the gravel road that runs past our place.
The pace of travel is different, of course, and the scenery is no longer self-contained. A drama taking place in a driveway
or a side yard doesn’t elapse in a split second, as it does when you drive by in a car. It has a chance to play out, and our
passing changes the way it plays. As we ride along the road, Remedy and I are always trading measures of alertness. He notices
everything long before I do, but he’s surprised by things I happen to know are not surprising. We’re implicated in the world.
Everyone waves, and we wave too. People come out onto their porches and pull curtains aside to look, and we look back. There’s
more than enough time for acknowledgment.

East of our place runs a two-lane blacktop road just like the ones that crisscross Iowa. Most of the time it’s pretty quiet,
but for a few hours on weekends it carries a lot of traffic. Squads of bikers come rumbling down the hill, while RVs struggle
up the hill. On Saturdays a parade of pickup trucks towing race cars makes its way to the track ten miles northwest of us.
In winter and on rainy days, truckers rattle their jake brakes all the way down the hill.

Whenever I work in the vegetable garden or attend to the bees or feed the horses, I step into an amphitheater that rises from
the road. I imagine myself as a child driving past in the backseat of the family car, looking across a pasture at a man walking
down the yard in a bee suit and a veil. I’m visible for only a second and then I’m gone.

A
visit to Walden Pond doesn’t resolve the image of Henry Thoreau. What it does instead is clarify the contradictions, the
disparities from which that image is shaped. The light rising from the surface of the pond on a June afternoon reflects indiscriminately
on the objects around it. The same was true of Thoreau’s mind, no matter how ill assorted the objects he wrote about might
have been. What harmony there is in Thoreau’s thinking, I believe, came from the collision of dissimilar ideas, the struggle,
as he might have put it, between the acorn and the chestnut obeying their own laws.

Thoreau’s best work is the result of two very different but complementary perspectives. One came about when he refused to
pay his poll tax and was jailed in Concord for a night. Of the village and its institutions on that evening, he wrote that
he was “fairly inside of it.” The other perspective was, of course, the one he took when he chose to live fairly outside of
Concord, in a small, handbuilt cabin on a rise above Walden Pond.

Both stances, for that’s what they were, were honored a couple of summers ago in a clearing on Pine Hill, just southeast of
the pond, by a crowd that included the president and the first lady. The occasion was the dedication of the Thoreau Institute
and the permanent conservation of ninety-six acres of the Walden Woods, both brought about by Don Henley, lead vocalist of
the Eagles.

President and Mrs. Clinton had come to Walden at Henley’s invitation. So too had the professors who introduced Henley to Thoreau’s
writings, and so had Mohandas Gandhi’s great-granddaughter and Ed Begley Jr. and the rest of the Eagles. And so, most improbably
of all, had Tony Bennett, who jogged out of the Walden Woods and onto the stage as if it were the Copacabana. He sang one
unaccompanied verse of “America” and then trotted back into the arms of the waiting foliage. It was an afternoon of disparities,
which the bright sun did nothing to dispel.

When the president stepped up to the lectern and leaned his arms across the top, I couldn’t help thinking of what Thoreau
noticed during his night in jail—not the striking of the town clock or “the evening sounds of the village,” but the fact that
he’d never “seen its institutions before.” I’d never seen the institution of the presidency in person before, but the man
on the stage stood deep within it, and he talked about the distortion it created, remembering a time when he and his wife
could walk in the woods without the experience seeming more real to observers than it did to the two of them.

It was a basic trope of Thoreau’s mind to search for a point of view slightly higher than the one you could gain from the
top of Pine Hill. He couldn’t say what you might see from the very highest vantage point, but perhaps his own was high enough.
“It is not many moments,” he wrote, “that I live under a government, even in this world.” I tried to imagine what Thoreau
might have said about the tribute being paid to him from so deep within a primary institution of a government he barely acknowledged,
but there were too many answers, all of them true and all contradictory.

W
hen the early bird sings at four
A.M.
, the only other sound is the dogs running out their dreams at the foot of the bed. Somewhere on the Atlantic the sun is already
rising, but at our place the sky at that hour is no brighter than tarnished silver, a superior dullness in the eastern windows.
The early bird is extremely early, and it seems to have perched on the bedside lamp, so piercing is its call. In the phonetic
language birders use to represent birdsong, the early bird says, “Why don’t—you get—up?—Why don’t—you get—up?” But at four
A.M.
it’s all too easy to drift back to sleep. Soon the early bird seems to be saying, in dreamlike fashion, “Guess what—you’ve
just—won! Guess what—you’ve just—won!” It’s worth putting on some clothes and going to find out.

It’s forty-four degrees outside. The grass is wet with dew. Breath hangs in the air almost as quietly as Venus in the southern
sky. The early bird, a nesting robin by the sound of it, is stationed in the boughs of a pine across the road. The clarity
of the robin’s call is a measure of the silence. It will be a windy day, the trees full of their own noises by afternoon,
but for now their stillness enlarges the scale on which this solo bird performs. When the robin pauses for a moment, I can
hear everything in the world, because there’s almost nothing to hear.

Winter mornings hinge on just a change in light without much change in sound. But a summer morning when the sky first glows
is a cathedral of anticipation. The choirs that Shakespeare had in mind are neither bare nor ruined, only silent, until one
by one, and then all in a rush, the birds fill in. It was never quite so clear before this morning’s walk that song is an
attribute of light. The birds understand it perfectly. A finch begins to call in a lazy, staccato pulse, the rhythm of an
inexpert seamstress on an old-fashioned Singer. A cardinal starts to spear the air with his voice. Down at the foot of the
grape arbor, a cowbird suddenly fizzes and pops. The canopy of trees is answered by the understory, and the tall grasses in
the eastern field fill with birdsong too. One by one the birds add depth to the horizon, until at last there’s room for the
sun to rise.

I
t’s been an abrupt, sodden spring in southwestern Montana. The rivers are full of snowmelt and will be full for many days
to come. At Carter’s Bridge, just south of Livingston, the Yellowstone River sucks at the concrete pilings with a low, hydraulic
hiss. The discolored current swarms with floating debris, mostly cottonwood branches, their bark half stripped by the commotion.
Upstream and down, the river gnaws at its banks, pulling away great fragments of earth, which struggle for a moment and then
succumb, dissolving in a darker swirl of water.

In Yellowstone National Park, not far from the western entrance, there’s an enormous meadow where, in normal times, the Madison
River bends away from the road toward a cliff face in the distance. Last week that meadow was totally submerged. I stood near
the road and watched bison wading belly-deep across a limitless sheet of water, as if they were amphibious. They moved somnolently,
all except one young male who was running to catch up with the herd, splashing his way in the bright sunlight. He looked like
an American version of the bull who carried Europa out to sea. Some bison had managed to climb up onto the roadway. They swung
their heads as they walked, their fur hanging in tatters, like seaweed, from their flanks.

Still farther into the park, along the Firehole River, the buffalo wallows had turned into tide pools. In some there was only
a dense swirl of algae, but others quivered with temporary life, the nymphs of aquatic insects trying to conceal themselves
from a burning sun. Here the bison were dry, their sleek, red calves grazing beside them. When they’re this young, buffalo
calves look like they belong to a different species than their parents, who seem to be all head and spine. The difference
in appearance causes much confusion. One visitor, watching an early June herd of adults and young, asked a local angler which
were the buffalo and which were the bison. A truly perplexed tourist praised the Park Service for assigning St. Bernard dogs
to guard the herds.

Slowly the bison on the Firehole River drifted out of the hot sun and into the timber. They left behind a carcass of their
own kind, now many days old and still pungent. A solitary raven did a questioning dance across the river, its ratcheting call
echoing over the water. In the far distance, an angler walked down to the murky flow of the Firehole. With his rod beneath
one arm, he lifted his hands together, apparently to pray. He stood that way for a very long time. He was selecting a trout
fly, as if, under such unpromising conditions, his choice might actually make a difference.