The Rural Life (18 page)

I was stooped over in the weeder’s posture, left forearm resting on my left knee, right hand wrapped around a rosette of burdock
leaves, my head exposed only in that small half-moon between the back of the baseball cap I was wearing and its adjustable
strap. I had decided the burdock was a weed, and the bee had decided I was a threat. The bee sting flared up with that familiar
white heat and then faded abruptly away. Unless you’re allergic, it’s much more satisfying to be stung by a bee than by a
mosquito. There’s none of that cautious, reluctant, hovering parasitism—that sneaking effort to steal some blood and then
fly away. What a bee is really good at is transmitting hostility.

I must have looked like a bear to that bee. The beekeepers I know have trouble with bears, which take an almost orgiastic
pleasure in scattering a hive’s contents. When a bear visits an apiary, it looks as though the bear planted a bomb and then
retreated to the edge of the woods to detonate it. Perhaps bears like the salt of the stings as much as they love the sweet
of the honey and the taste of the wax and the white brood lying in their cells. We haven’t seen any bears around here—yet—largely
because of a busy road and horses and dogs and an electric fence. That doesn’t keep the bees from being bear-wary in their
ancestral way.

But late one night not long ago—one of the most beautiful nights this summer—a black bear crossed the road just in front of
us as we were driving home through southern Vermont. It was the fragile end of dusk. Out of thick, sloping cover on the far
side of the road, the bear burst at a lope, visible for only as long as it took to clear the road. But that was long enough
to see that its fur was the same color as the night sky and that the gloss on its fur had the same effect as stars shining
out in the night. We coasted through its vapor trail, and if we could have, we would have smelled its very bearness. It was
the only thing to think about all the rest of the way home.

F
or the past few years I’ve driven west every summer, and every summer the question returns: Where does the West begin? There
are plenty of commonsense answers, the kind that break this country up into regions as neatly defined as the pieces in a child’s
wooden puzzle. If it were just a matter of political boundaries, I wouldn’t look for the West before the Colorado border.
And if it were just a matter of mood, the West would begin in upstate New York on the day I walk the horses into the horse
trailer, check the running lights one more time, and pull away into the fog of dawn.

The mind travels so much faster than a pickup truck hauling two humans, two dogs, two horses, and all their gear in a gooseneck
trailer. The first day we come to the farms and factories southwest of Toledo. Rural roads dwindle to a single paved lane,
and cars, meeting each other, drive half on a gravel track and half on the asphalt. A dank, sulfurous glow hangs over the
truck stops and drive-ins near the Maumee River and the town of Napoleon, Ohio. The question of where the West begins is mooted,
for the moment. It’s just another way of asking, When will we get there?

But by early afternoon the next day—western Illinois, eastern Iowa—I get momentary glimpses of a setting that carries me westward
a thousand miles at once. It’s usually a pasture threaded by a creek, rare enough in an empire of soybeans and corn. Cattle
wander among the trees, one or two of the trunks rubbed bare, bone white. The scene flashes across my eyes, raising the picture
of a similar place along Wyoming’s Tongue River or Crazy Woman Creek. Then the corridor of corn resumes, row after row flickering
past in the wet August light.

When the polite undulations of Iowa are past and we start the slow westward uptilt of Nebraska, the search for the West begins
in earnest. Is it a copse of cottonwoods in a creek bottom? The first herd of horses where roans and duns predominate? I’m
always surprised, driving across Nebraska, that no one thought to mark the hundredth meridian, somewhere between Cozad and
Gothenburg, a well-known line of demarcation between the humid East and the semiarid West. But in Nebraska they irrigate the
cornfields, and so the difference, in vegetation at least, is diminished.

Beyond North Platte, nearing Ogallala, the West begins to win out over the Midwest. The mileage signs give distances to Cheyenne
and Denver instead of Chicago and Des Moines. The low hills in the distance begin to be ridged with pines and the farms start
to look like ranches. Yet something is still missing, some defining marker. Sagebrush would do, or a small wilderness of yucca
or prickly pear. And there, in the fields ahead, is the answer. Now I remember, for the answer is the same every year, on
this highway at least. The West begins where they put hay up in stacks.

B
eside a county road near the town of Hygiene, Colorado, stands a cottonwood that turned completely yellow the second week
of August. To southbound cyclists that tree lies hidden, lurking beneath a sharp dip in the road. They coast along in summer’s
full incumbency—the scent of hay practically creasing their foreheads—when all at once the asphalt slopes away, and that lone
cottonwood presents itself, its leaves shimmering in a bright wind that suddenly seems autumnal, full of the brittleness,
the clarity, of fall.

It’s not as though anyone goes searching for autumn in the midst of summer. In most of America those seasons have reversed
their traditional, agricultural meanings. Summer is now the harvest season—a harvest of leisure, of fresh vegetables from
the garden. The onset of autumn has become an occasion for brisk renewal, and Labor Day, not the autumnal equinox, is the
hinge on which those seasons now swing. I try to ignore the signs of summer’s end—the drying milkweed in the fields, the reddening
sumac along the railroad tracks, the schoolbuses. But sooner or later there’s a sign too portentous to ignore.

A few nights ago an enormous flight of blackbirds emerged from the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. The blackbirds flew across
open pasture and out over the low ground where Little Goose Creek flows. From the bluff overlooking the creek, I could see
for a moment what shape the flock had taken. It was a lens of blackbirds. It neared the crown of a great cottonwood, and suddenly
one bird, then another, plunged downward, dying on the wing it seemed, into the branches. The flock swirled, then settled.
There was a momentary hush. Then, as if a school bell had sounded, the tree erupted in chatter, which rang out across the
high ground.

After a sight like that I’m almost ready for autumn. But not quite. The days are still hot in Wyoming, the evenings warm,
the skies full of dry thunder. The ranchers are beginning to move cattle to the sale yards and railheads—a sure sign of fall—but
summer will reign for at least a few more days. I drive east of Sheridan, just to catch the evening, and wind up chasing a
Burlington Northern coal train at sunset past the grade crossings at Dutch Center and East Dutch, past the old grain elevator
at Wyarno. There the pavement ends, and the train pulls ahead, its new aluminum coal cars gleaming in the last of the light.
I stop on a rise to watch the train slip away into the next valley, out among the round bales stacked in windbreaks. As the
rumble of the train disappears, the crickets persist, and in their voices it’s high summer all over again.

I
n 1875 a photographer named Alphonse Deriaz took a picture of the Butchers’ Festival in the town of Morges, Switzerland. The
butchers, twenty-six of them, stand at attention in the town square, their aprons swept to one side like dashing military
tunics. Each man shoulders one of the tools of his trade. Five of the butchers share a raised platform with an enormous white-faced
bullock wearing a halter and a crown of flowers while townsfolk look down from the windows above. What’s striking here, besides
the soft expression on the bullock’s face, is the very public way that each butcher identifies himself by his labor, by his
apron and bone-saw, and by the fraternity, publicly attested, of fellow butchers.

The festival this photograph preserves feels Old World, utterly unlike a modern American Labor Day, which is now less a celebration
of labor than one last gasping infusion of summer’s ozone. But police officers and firefighters and union members and politicians
still march together through the city streets on this day. It would be something to see the butchers of New York marching
too, dressed for work—to see them and the sommeliers and the toll takers and the men and women who build wooden water tanks
and each of the vocations that gives flesh to this society marching side by side, a society articulated, for one parade, into
all its laboring parts.

What’s Old World about the Butchers’ Festival isn’t only the uniforms and the ability to look the source of meat right in
the eye. It’s the sense of lifelong calling, of a time when going to work meant assuming, for life, an identity as binding,
if perhaps not as deranging, as Bartleby the scrivener’s. The days when men and women bore the distinguishing marks of their
labor have certainly not ended, nor will they ever end as long as the material world is shaped in part by human muscle. But
now we seem as migratory in our vocations as we do in our dwelling places, as ready to shift jobs as to shift cities. There’s
a familiar, prevailing sense that no matter what the job, it’s probably too small to contain something as volatile and transcendent
as our latter-day identities—made up, we seem to believe, of finer stuff than those of our ancestors.

Labor is both trap and liberation, servitude and release, and it’s tempting to think of labor—even the word itself—in largely
historical terms, to remember photographs from a century ago of coal-darkened miners and young women huddled over sewing machines,
of factory workers looking up from the conveyor belt at the photographer’s flash. But there’s nothing historical about these
labors. They’re still being performed today. Where the world of work is concerned, we still dwell among our ancestors. Some
people dream of living in a world without work. But the better dream, even on a day as relaxed as Labor Day, is that of a
world in which everyone has the work he wants.