The Rural Life (23 page)

On yet another fence post another hawk preens, and on the unplowed side of the road antelope move stiffly up a ridge and out
of sight. Then the highway is still, except for the wind. What day of the week it is is anybody’s guess until the next vehicle
passes, when, for a moment—in the presence of a service truck or a postal carrier or a delivery van—Monday reappears.

W
hen fall comes to the Southwest, the chamisa blooms, and suddenly a shrub that is inconspicuous most of the year seems to
dominate the landscape. An old chamisa plant grows upright out of a weir of downswept dead boughs, and its whiplike pale green
branches terminate in clumps of yellow florets, which brush against one’s hips. When rain falls—and Santa Fe recently got
half an inch—the scent of chamisa seems almost too heavy for the wind to carry. The odor is opaque, insidious. It infiltrates.
It loiters. Even with nostrils buried deep in the plant, you end up asking, What does chamisa smell like?

The common name of chamisa is rabbitbrush, and the scientific name is
Chrysothamnus nauseosus,
which says something about the olfactory impression chamisa makes on botanists. But
nauseosus
is a pretty vague descriptor. If you went about giving binomial names to the artifacts of modern life, how many of them might
deserve
nauseosus
as their specific term? Coming upon a stand of chamisa, trying again to decipher its scent, you wonder,
Nauseosus
how? “It smells like a rank little fox,” said one Santa Fe resident. “It smells like being four years old,” said another,
an answer that hints at the profound association between odor and memory. To use the perfumer’s language, the scent of chamisa
is at once woody, green, and animalic, with several miscellaneous notes thrown in. It smells like a kitchen full of fresh
herbs where a mouse has died behind the stove. It smells like a sachet in a drawer full of rubber gloves. It smells like the
Southwest in autumn.

Talking about scent is like speaking a foreign tongue badly: you’re always searching for a word that lies just out of reach,
uncertain, finally, of your own meaning. It’s easier to describe a complex emotion than a complex odor. What do the dogs of
Santa Fe think when the chamisa comes into bloom? Perhaps an entire spectrum of scent goes into eclipse, concealed beneath
the weight of rabbitbrush. Or perhaps in the unending orchestration of smell in their world, the blossoming of chamisa is
like the sudden entrance of the cello section, playing slightly out of tune and out of tempo. In the end, you’re brought up
hard against the circularity of scent. Chamisa smells like chamisa. And vice versa.

O
n a warm October afternoon, high in a sugar maple, a crow tore apart a hornet’s nest, discarding shreds of gray hornet-paper
like leaves in a monochrome fall. A hail of ladybugs rose and then fell against the south side of the house. They were hapless
fliers burdened by ungainly wing-covers, clattering almost inaudibly against the parched siding, seeking cracks and lifted
clapboards to winter under. The sight of so many ladybugs in flight, each one armed with a faint acrid stench, looked like
the threat of a hard season coming. When that many creatures take shelter at once, you wonder what they’re sheltering from.
Soon we’ll know.

The woods are bright, brighter where the maples stand against a backdrop of unchanging hemlock. Even as light leaks out of
the month, the woods seem to compensate, opening again to the western horizon. The sun has made its way southward like the
fox that crosses the pasture most evenings. The air wears the tannic acidity of decaying leaves. The suppleness of light just
when it fades in late afternoon seems almost mocking. It’s a humiliating display of color, towering out of the treetops and
into the backlit clouds overhead. At twilight Lindy found a newly killed male cardinal lying in the grass, its head severed
by one of our cats. There was nothing in the day as sharply defined as the line where the black around its bill met the red
of its crest.

That morning I had lit a brush pile on fire. There was a raucous half hour when the flames seemed to catch at something inside
me. Then the fire settled down to business, smoldering steadily, adding its own taint to the air. Crab apple leaves on boughs
cut a day earlier shriveled like a time-lapse glimpse of late autumn. The fruit sizzled and dropped into the flames. A couple
of hours later the pile was nothing more than a small mound of ash.

After twilight had come and gone and the temperature had dropped, I walked down again to where the bonfire had been. I turned
the ashes with a manure fork. A night breeze blew across the coals and reddened them. They seemed to ripple in the darkness,
their light refracted by their heat. For a moment I stood beside them, taking in their warmth. The unsteady lights in the
ashes looked like the fires of some ancient city seen from high above, a place described by Goethe long ago, when he wrote,
“The king is out hunting, the queen is expecting a child, and so things could not be better.”

A
t noon today, local apparent sidereal time will be approximately 1:29. The Julian Day will be 2450384, which is the number
of days since high noon on the first of January 4713
B.C.E.
That was the last time the twenty-eight-year solar and nineteen-year lunar cycles began on the same day as a fifteen-year
Roman tax cycle, a coincidence first noticed in 1582 by the percipient Joseph Justus Scaliger, who invented the Julian calendar.
Exactly 7,980 years will have passed before these cycles resume in unison and a new Julian Period begins, in the year 3267.
(That
will be some celebration.) If you probe a little deeper into the subject of time, you discover leap seconds and negative
leap seconds and International Seconds. There’s a Modified Julian Date and a Truncated Julian Date. There are ideal clocks
generating proper time. Greenwich Mean Time has a familiar, prime meridian ring to it, but alas it’s been replaced by Coordinated
Universal Time, which sounds as though Earth presumed to control the clockwork in the distant cosmos.

But what do we call the hour we gained when we set our clocks back last night? It has no name. You make a pilgrimage to all
the appliances—the alarm clocks, the wall clocks, the coffeemaker, the telephone, the VCR, the PC—and it seems for a moment
as though time were a utility that got pumped into the house with the alternating current. Daylight Saving Time is the ultimate
flat tax. Everybody pays up when it begins on the first Sunday in April, and on the last Sunday in October everybody reaps
a one hundred percent refund of their hour, not a second of it lost to overhead. There are a few confusing exceptions. The
Hopi Reservation doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time. The Navajo Nation, which surrounds the Hopi Reservation, does. The
state of Arizona, which surrounds Nava-jos and Hopis alike, doesn’t. All three entities returned to synchronicity with the
rest of the country, and their neighbors, last night. So did Indiana.

There’s a geographical equivalent to this temporal leap. Imagine driving north through the open prairie, along the edge of
one township after another. (A township is a surveyed square six miles to a side.) The farther north you go, the more the
lines of longitude converge, which means the township grid is steadily being compressed by the longitudinal grid. To adjust
for this, the road north makes a lateral jog every twenty-four miles. We have just made the big jog east (the sun rises earlier
now) on the northward road into winter. We keep going this direction for another fifty-five days until the road ends and the
tundra begins. Out there the caribou and musk ox are grazing, a sign that it will be time to turn around and head back south
toward summer.

W
hen snow began falling on Sunday, I realized that a line from Keats—“until they think warm days will never cease”—had been
running through my head for weeks. The line is from “To Autumn,” one of the loveliest poems in the language, and “they” are
the bees, whose “clammy cells,” as Keats calls their comb, have been “o’erbrimm’d” by summer. Jonathan Bate, author of a book
called
The Song of the Earth,
observes that the late summer of 1819, the season leading up to the completion of Keats’s ode on September 19, “was clear
and sunny on thirty-eight out of the forty-seven days from 7 August to 22 September” and that temperatures were milder in
the final week of that period than they had been in three years.

This wasn’t merely a spate of beautiful weather. It was weather of a kind, Bate notes, that would actually make breath come
easier for a consumptive like Keats. There could be nothing more personal than the question of Keats’s lung capacity, and
yet “To Autumn” doesn’t read as a personal poem. There’s something deceptively long-winded in the syntax of the first stanza,
and some critics have seen a consumptive’s hectic flush in the stubble plains touched with “rosy hue.” But Bate reminds us,
too, how broad the boundaries of “personal” experience really are. For Keats those boundaries include the season as a whole.
The fine weather o’erbrimm’d him, and in doing so gave voice to itself.

Until the past few days, it was a Keatsian autumn, full of what the poet calls, in a letter from those same weeks, “chaste
weather—Dian skies.” Never mind that the leaves are now almost gone, or that the skies are now unchaste, gray, and dousing
us with snow showers. Somehow the brightness of the trees created the illusion that the periphery of my awareness had expanded.
When Lindy and I walked the dogs, it felt as though we were all walking with eyebrows raised, though for the dogs that would
be with nostrils distended.

Keats personified autumn, imagining her by a cider press or fast asleep in a “half-reap’d furrow.” Personifying the natural
world is so fundamental and so limitless that it seems sometimes like the foundation of all poetry. To some, I suppose, personifying
nature is an act of hubris, a refusal to accept the otherness of the world around us. But in a fall like this one—dry after
a long wet, warm after unusual coolness—personifying nature seems like a means of meeting nature halfway. In the ghostliness
of Keats’s autumn, “sitting careless on a granary floor,” what we really see is the way the season swells within us.