The Rural Life (17 page)

W
yoming is a metropolis of clouds. Some are born in the state, some move here from other places, but they all prosper, because
Wyoming is also a theater of wind. For days at a time this summer, the clouds have passed in migratory flight, complicating
the sunlight. In late afternoon especially, along the northeastern rim of the Bighorn Mountains, great rafts of orographic
clouds—shaped by the mountains, that is—rise with the terrain and then lean out over the creek bottoms, darkening the face
of the Bighorns and reabsorbing that darkness.

It’s been a wet summer in Wyoming, and rich in cloud life. Hay bales have been stacked in pyramids in the fields to keep the
damp off, and the barley has gone unirrigated. Often enough, when morning dawns, the dogs run up the hayfield road, inhaling
and exhaling cloud, until they vanish into even grayness.

Those are the usual summer days, which often turn cloudless by noon. They end with lightning flickering all around the night
horizon, the storms so distant that they lie beneath the constellation Scorpio, which never gets very high in the sky this
far north. But along the road from Cheyenne to Sheridan a squall line blew in from the open prairie to the east, an ominous,
upward-thrusting shield of precipitation. The temperature dropped nearly thirty degrees, and the rain fell against the direction
of the wind so heavily that drivers pulled off the road, turned off their wipers, and watched the lightning take dead aim
around them.

Twenty miles down the road, the temperature rose as much as it had fallen. The squall line broke apart into a landscape of
sky that beggared the landscape of earth. Clouds congealed into innumerable shapes, each requiring its own analogy. Shards
of flint and flakes of obsidian knifed through the middle atmosphere. Mammatus clouds, as smoothly pebbled as a low-water
beach, clung to the underside of thunderheads, while pileus clouds—the name means skullcap—clung to their tops.

Some clouds had become castellated, and others had been beaten into sheets of lead or folded back upon themselves again and
again like Damascus steel. The galactic gas jets of the deep universe were present and so were the nebulae. So too was the
tight, blue-tinted hairdo of a matron marching westward in dudgeon across the sky. She canted over the sagebrush flats, hit
an updraft, and was teased into nothingness.

I
’ve been stung by nettles so often this summer that my hands have reached a state of continuous numbness—not so numb, however,
that I can’t feel the next nettle bite. I go down without gloves to the vegetable garden in early morning when the dew is
still thick, planning only to drink my coffee and watch the potatoes grow. But new nettles have always sprung up overnight,
and old ones that lay hidden in the hops reveal themselves in the low sun. I can’t help plucking them, even barehanded.
Weeds of the Northeast,
that indispensable book, prints a lurid photo of a nettle’s stinging hairs. It adds, “When the tip of the hair is broken
off on contact with the skin, it acts as a hypodermic needle, injecting the toxins histamine, acetylcholine, and 5-hydroxytryptamine
into the wound.” Nettles prefer rich soil, so I acknowledge the compliment and heave them onto the compost pile.

On a terrace above the potatoes, a pumpkin plant has wound its way into the sweet corn. So have the vines of the cherry tomatoes,
some winter squash, and three cucumber plants—two cukes too many. I step into this maze of vines and stalks every day just
to enjoy its architecture and to admire the clutching and grasping going on in the narrow dirt streets beneath the cornstalks.
This part of the garden isn’t the least bit pastoral. All the vining plants have their hackles up. Their leaves and stems
bristle and rasp against the skin as I shift them about, while trying not to step on the cucumbers, which are armored with
stiff spurs. The common mellifluousness of spring’s new growth is long gone. Everyone in the garden is a character now, for
better or worse.

Ripeness is just a form of specialization, or a specialization of form. Either way, it’s descending upon this garden quickly
now, like dusk creeping a little nearer every day. It seems like an incredible extravagance to wait so long, so patiently,
for an ear of sweet corn or a ripe tomato. The wait is nearly over. I almost expect a pause when ripeness comes, but the garden
will rush forward into senescence, or rather into its own definition of ripeness instead of mine. A broccoli has already bolted.
The pea vines are stiff and brown. The pole beans have begun to wilt. Japanese beetles have eaten nearly all of the Virginia
creeper that steals from the upper garden into the lower one. Only the nettles continue to come up spring green every day,
the nettles, the lamb’s-quarters, and the jewelweed.

T
his is a good hopper year in the West, if you happen to like hoppers, a year of subscourge abundance. In an unscientific study
conducted late last afternoon, I discovered that if you walk with two dogs across a level, sixty-acre Wyoming pasture, you
kick up a gross of hoppers with every step, never mind what the dogs dislodge. One of the dogs, a yellow mutt, lunges at the
hoppers that leap into her path, mouths them, and spits them out, blinking. The other dog is too stately for hoppers. When
horses walk through the tall, dry grass, they lower their heads and weave them back and forth, watching the insects fan out
beneath their feet, listening to the sudden eruption, which sounds like high wind among brittle leaves or the very distant
call of a kingfisher.

The birds love the sudden proliferation. You usually see robins tugging at earthworms as though they were anchor chains, but
now the robins run along the edges of gravel roads, picking off hoppers as they go. There’s a lot of extra protein available,
which is good for the grouse and pheasants and good for the trout patrolling the stream banks. In the morning, as the sun
is getting strong, the hoppers climb from the high grass onto the eastern walls of ranch buildings, where they wait until
they’re fully charged, ready to go off. They’re easy to capture in the morning.

A grasshopper will cling to the end of your finger, trying always to keep itself out of the line of sight. Seen in profile,
there’s a muted, almost Italianate beauty to a grasshopper. It looks embossed, machined, any one of its body parts raised
only slightly above the others. A rich herringbone pattern runs along the enormous thigh, and the stubby, segmented antennae
darken outward from the head to a deep sienna. Look near enough and it’s possible to see your own reflection in the impassive,
oval eye.

I wonder what the ants make of it all. Somehow, out here in the West, the grasshopper seems more sympathetic than he does
in the old fable. The difference between an ant and a grasshopper is that a grasshopper believes in posterity while an ant
prefers immediate family. What’s so improvident about grazing all summer, waiting for wings, and then laying dozens of eggs
that will hatch when winter has come and gone and you’ve come and gone with it? Somehow, out here, it seems preferable to
expire alone on the high prairie, as a grasshopper will, than to die, as the ants do, in a hole among many thousands of your
kind.

A
few days ago, at the edge of a desolate mall in New York’s Mohawk Valley, I saw a young Amish woman sitting on the back end
of a horseless carriage—horseless because the horse was elsewhere. She was selling sweet corn. Everyone is selling sweet corn
right now and selling it with an almost touching earnestness, knowing that this is the season of sweet corn glut. I’ve come
across a few ears and a coffee can for a cash till lying on a board beside a garden. I’ve seen children’s wagons mounded with
dark ears parked on the sidewalk. At some of the bigger roadside stands, it looks as if the proprietors were really selling
brown paper bags and using the corn to hold them up. The bags absorb the moisture the corn gives off and collapse while being
carried into the house. Everyone says the best way to prepare sweet corn is to remove it from the stalk, husk it on the way
to the kitchen, and drop it into already boiling water. I get good results if I drive it home, drop it on the lawn when the
bag breaks, and then prepare as usual.

In a place like the Mohawk Valley, where some large-scale farming is still being done, sweet corn is nearly always being sold
within sight of fields full of field corn, the kind marked near the fence line by a seed company sign and a number. The number
registers the type of seed planted there, which may be, among other possibilities, a white, yellow, high-oil, extractable-starch,
or silage corn. The number also marks a way out of the trap that sweet corn inventors are in, who are obliged to think up
names like Bodacious, Calico Belle, Maverick, and Zenith.

The roadside sweet corn grows in patches, gardens, and, sometimes, a good-sized stand of plowed ground. The dent corn, the
stuff in the fields, grows in landscapes. It’s as much architecture as agriculture, an architecture that has grown more and
more grandiose. In an Amish field, I saw a horse-drawn one-row corn picker. Here and there, abandoned along fence lines, you
sometimes see rusted four- and eight-row pickers—the kind that fit over the cowl of a tractor like some kind of medieval horse
armor. Out in the irrigated corn forests of central Nebraska, there are corn-picking heads for combines that are far too wide
for the highways.

Forty years ago, the field corn seemed widely spaced and somehow personable enough to hide in, the way Cary Grant did in
North by Northwest.
You couldn’t edge your way into some modern fields. The corn they’re seeded with comes in pallets full of bags holding 80,000
kernels each and plants out at around 30,000 kernels per acre. In the dense river-bottom fields along the Mohawk River, all
that corn is nearing a biological climax. It won’t be picked for another two months, but it’s now coming into the last of
the green, those final weeks before the leaves and stalks begin the slow browning of autumn. Every field looks like an army
of aspirants, leaves flung skyward in a kind of hosanna.

I
was stung by a honeybee on the back of the head while weeding in the garden one afternoon. There was nothing surprising about
being stung, since upward of 100,000 bees live about thirty feet from where I was working. I could hear the droning of the
hives and smell the sweet, waxy scent that emanates from a healthy colony. The air high above my head was thick with bee traffic
homing downward out of the east at a velocity that’s not easily credible unless you’ve actually seen it. Still, I resented
being stung. “After all I’ve done for you,” was my first thought, a sign that I haven’t quite matured as a beekeeper. But
it wasn’t even the sting that I resented. It was the slap of an angry bee—a suicidal bee—against my scalp and the knowledge
that she had decided at a distance to poison me.