The Rural Life (12 page)

Until he left home for college in 1943, my dad followed his dad into the predawn darkness in work clothes every morning, headed
for the dairy barn or the machine shed, a map of the day and its connection to other days already in my grandfather’s mind.
I barely remember seeing my grandfather at work on the farm, only an image of watching him turn in the seat of an old Farmall
tractor while shelling corn in late autumn or winter. The farm, when I first knew it, was still very much what he had made
it over the years, though he lived in town by then. But when he and I drove out to the farm from town, I felt acutely that
I was coming as a visitor and that my grandfather was arriving himself in visitor’s clothing. His familiarity with the families,
most of them relatives, who lived behind the windbreaks on the horizon, his keen appraisal of the crops in the fields and
the condition of the cattle and hogs, the intimacy with which he knew the farmland itself—that was simply lost on me.

But “intimacy” is probably not a word my grandfather would have used to describe the way he knew his land. Intimacy implies
too equal a balance between farmer and farm and not enough subjection of the soil. It’s also too private a word. There’s something
public about the open terrain of northwest Iowa, something public too about the progressive way my grandfather farmed, as
well as the role he took in George, a town his own father, who emigrated from Germany at eighteen in 1884, had helped found.
What my grandfather really possessed was an intimate acquaintance with the character of his own labor, a private, unspoken
awareness of how far he could push himself, how strong he was, where he was weak, and what work gave him greatest satisfaction.
The intimacy with which he knew his land was really a reflection of the intimacy with which he knew himself. Both kinds of
knowledge were tempered by self-expectation rooted in a roundly public sense of community whose social topography was defined
by close kinship, the presence of so much family, so many Klinkenborgs. All these things were fostered, in one way or another,
in his children.

When I returned to California in 1978 to help my parents raise the frame of their new house, I saw that for the first time
in my life, and perhaps in his life too, my dad had found a scale of living—a landscape for his labor—that matched the scale
of self-expectation he had seen in his father. Dad no longer owned just a house and yard, but a place we began, half-joking,
to call the ranch. Working at the building site that summer, every one of us knew that some inner tension in the family had
been released, a prospect enlarged, a dead end narrowly averted. In 1966, when we arrived from Iowa, Sacramento was a rough,
unreconnoitered city only apparently gentled by the presence of so many government offices. By the time my parents moved to
the edge of the mountains a dozen years later, a paralytic blandness had settled over the city and its cul-de-sac suburbs,
a blandness as palling as the tule fogs that blind the San Joaquin Valley every winter. But on thirteen acres high above the
fog, under a canopy of ponderosa pines along the Georgetown Divide, my father rebuilt a warm-weather version of his childhood,
complete with cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, tractors, and the obligation to walk out onto the land in his work clothes—a
short-sleeved shirt and a pair of grease- or pitch-stained pants—every day when he was done with school. And by rebuilding
his childhood he reframed the rest of my adulthood.

If I counted all the days I spent working beside my father at the ranch over the past twenty-five years, they would total
only three or four months. And if I tried to make a list of the things he taught me directly in that time, it would be a short
one. There wasn’t much to teach in most of the work we did together in those years. Burning a brush pile doesn’t have many
fine points. And, as we both learned long ago, my father and I are ill suited as teacher and student. He’s impatient to move
on to the next job, because he has a long list of jobs to finish before lunch, and I’m impatient because I know that some
expert has written a book or an article about whatever we’re doing which I can read at leisure. But every time I came home,
something new had sprung up—an automated irrigation system, an apartment above the barn, a carport, a gazebo, new roof, new
paint. The number of animals rose and fell and rose again. And soon, enough time had passed for decay to set in, for the first
fences we built there to look run-down, like relics of a forgotten California. All the things Dad intended to do on the ranch
began to coexist in an almost melancholy way with all the things he actually did.

When you take on a property like the one my parents bought—thirteen rolling acres divided by a narrow irrigation ditch, broken
by veins of rock, and covered in poison oak and head-high Scotch broom—you simply set out to clear the land and find a building
site. But you leave traces of yourself with every decision you make, every fence you build, every tree you fell or plant,
every quarter-acre you choose to irrigate or leave dry. In twenty years’ time, a self-portrait emerges, and it exposes all
the subtleties of your character, whether you like it or not. The land and the shape of the buildings show precisely how much
disorder you can tolerate, how many corners you tend to cut, how much you think you can hide from yourself. Neatness may reflect
nothing more than a passion for neatness, or it may be a sign of small ambitions. And beyond the literal landscape—the one
that has been tilled and planted or logged or fenced or simply let alone—there is the ideal landscape that lives only in the
mind. Every day you explore the difference between the two, knowing that you can see what no one else can.

At the ranch I could walk in a minute or two from the lightest, most orderly region of my father’s personality—the wood-shop
or the apple orchard—across the irrigation ditch and down to a subliminal clutter of welding rods and oilcans and greasy tractor
parts in the dark precincts of the barn. In a corner near the highway lay a part of the property my dad almost never visited,
a dry, dusty tangle of raspberry brambles that must have pained him whenever he passed it on his way to the mailbox. Just
a hundred yards off lay a grassy, well-watered ridge where he must have looked up from his work sometimes and marveled, as
I did, at what he had made of this property. If you drove in the upper driveway, you came to a rose garden and a well-kept
lawn. If you took the lower driveway, you found fuel tanks standing by a dilapidated corral, grass growing through the frame
of an old sawmill, a sun-blistered camper shell resting on blocks. But I never once came to visit without seeing in those
things the profusion and self-confidence of my father’s character. I hope the mess I make speaks as well of me someday.

Dad is now seventy-six, healthy, vigorous, almost adolescent again, as seventy-six-year-olds tend to be these days. A couple
of years ago, just before my stepmother’s health failed, my parents sold the ranch and moved back down the mountain to a new
development on the outskirts of Sacramento. They bought a house not one stick of which they put up themselves, and my dad
started saying what a relief it was to have so little yard work to do. Now that I have a small farm of my own, I almost believe
him. Still, my dad added a screen porch to the new house himself. He planted tomatoes where his neighbors might have hired
a gardener to plant camellias.

It had never occurred to me that the ranch would be sold while my parents were alive. I felt the way I did when I learned
that my grandmother’s house in Iowa was being put up for sale, the way I’ll feel if the home farm near George ever leaves
the family. Every day I miss the ranch, not for its beauty alone, but because it was so inexpressibly of the people who made
it. It was home to a part of me I didn’t know existed until the summer we built the house there. That June, my brother John
and I camped out on the foundation, lying awake late at night to watch the stars overhead. My arms were tight from hammering
all day long, my back brown. The thought that in a few weeks I would return to the East Coast and a life among books and letters—a
life purely of my own choosing—was inadmissible. Some of Dad’s friends came to work on the house with us, and I was surprised
to discover that my impatience with their ineptitude was more than matched by my father’s impatience with them too. It was
the first sign in years of how much we had in common, or rather it was the first sign I was willing to accept.

This farm of mine—these few bony acres—is the estate I’ve inherited from my father, a landscape both tangible and intangible.
That’s how I think of it. It’s a way of propagating what I’ve learned about him and myself. It carries me back to a time when
I was very young, standing at the edge of the garden in a small Iowa town watching him work a hive of bees. He wore white
coveralls, a helmet and veil, and he stood on a stepladder because the hive was so tall, the honey flow from the surrounding
farm fields so heavy. When Dad was here last June, one of the first things we did was walk down to look at the beehives on
the edge of the garden. Then we worked together for a couple of days building a run-in shed for the horses. But as we set
posts and measured rafters, I realized that I wanted to be building
his
run-in shed, not mine. I wanted to be adding another structure to a property he no longer owned, assuring a continuity of
man and landscape that would last another thirty or forty years. I knew then that I would have to go on with this work alone,
that someday it would have to be both father and son to me.

A
t first light, about four o’clock, the bats begin fluttering at the roof ridge, slipping into the house through a bat-stained crack between clapboards. It’s just enough noise to wake me up, and for a moment I lie there, watching the dark shapes against the false dawn outside. The bats nest somewhere in the ceiling above my head, just beyond a layer of Sheetrock and insulation. It’s like having a chicken coop in the rafters.

It’s pleasant to pretend that wildness stops at the front door in the country, but it really doesn’t. In April I started seeds under a lamp in the basement, and when the seedlings were just ready to be pricked out and potted on, the mice grazed them down to bare stubs one night. A fox took a seat in the driveway the other morning and looked at the kitchen as if he expected to come in.

At night flying insects clatter and whir against the screen of a lighted window, and sometimes the bats pick them off the
screen, their wings just brushing it as they fly past. It comes as a surprise to realize once again how full the night is
with insects. Moths come flaring into the headlights like stones skipped down the highway. Last week I walked down to the
mailbox long after dark. Out in the open, where the darkness lessened, I saw an atmosphere full of insects drifting past,
like the metropolitan scene in a science fiction movie, airborne traffic vectoring this way and that. Twice in the past week
I found the corpse of a luna moth on the ground. It seemed less like the remains of a personal moth death than the wreck of
a pale green, iridescent, freight-carrying kite. As full as the air is of insects, it is that full of insect eaters too.

But as far as I can tell, no one’s eating the slugs. We try not to. We wash the lettuce from the garden three or four times,
picking over each leaf carefully before we spin it dry. The profusion of slugs this year reflects the damp, dark weather that
has clung since April. Slugs are a kind of animate precipitation, aqueous sloths. The garden is flecked with them in early
morning, and after I’ve tossed a few of them into the nettle patch, the revulsion they cause dies away—until one turns up
on the salad plate.

What we’re missing here, in this kingdom of airborne bugs, is barn swallows. I don’t know where they are. The barn is ready
and waiting. There are open pastures, and there are horses. There’s an overhead wire to perch on and gape at the world from.
We don’t spray, and we don’t knock down swallow nests. So where are the birds? Phoebes take bugs on the wing, and so do the
few tree swallows who live around here, and of course the bats. But it isn’t the same. Some quality about this place, some
aspect of its rusticity, won’t be official until the barn swallows move in.