The Rural Life (25 page)

Fifty years is both a very short and a very long time in the life of a good idea. The power of Leopold’s argument—buttressed
as it is by his clear, vigorous prose—has not been blunted in the least. In fact his argument seems more urgently true now
than ever. In the past fifty years Leopold’s work has helped drive the environmental movement. Yet the tendencies he lamented,
summed up in the phrase “despoliation of land,” have accelerated almost out of control.

Leopold will last not because he captured a moment or a feeling, though he does both in the first sections of
A Sand County Almanac.
He will last because we have scarcely begun to work out the implications of his ideas. He suggested an “ecological interpretation
of history,” which has only recently begun to be written. He recognized that the “ability to see the cultural value of wilderness
boils down… to a question of intellectual humility.” He described a dynamic that still threatens wildness. “The very scarcity
of wild places, reacting with the mores of advertising and promotion,” he wrote, “tends to defeat any deliberate effort to
prevent their growing still more scarce.”

These are formidable ideas. But none are more challenging than Leopold’s land ethic. It requires a rerooting in nature, a
forsaking of the hope that we can save wild or even open land on the basis of its economic value. We are busy, Leopold says,
“inventing subterfuges to give [nature] economic importance.” They won’t work. There’s a risk involved in creating a truly
ethical relation to the land. But Leopold believed in risk. “Too much safety,” he wrote, “seems to yield only danger in the
long run.”

I
suppose that if I were a woolly bear caterpillar or a squirrel storing hickory nuts or one of the other creatures said to
know in advance the severity of the winter ahead, I would be able to do just the right amount of work to get ready for it.
Instead I have to prepare for winter in the subjunctive, as if it were going to be severe—as if I were a doomsaying squirrel.
Like most people, I’m not a very good student of my own behavior, but I’ve noticed in myself an urge these days to get ready
for winter. I noticed it because it led me down to the barn one morning and kept me hard at work for several days, stacking
hay in the loft, preparing to heat the horses’ water tank, making a place in the barn aisle where the horseshoer could work
under lights and out of the wind.

On a warm noon when sun strikes the hive, the bees still fly, but it’s been cold enough recently for them to form their winter
cluster, a tight, buzzing ball at the center of their store of brood and honey. The flow of information into the hive—and
with it nectar and pollen—has dwindled to nothing. In fields and waste places, the stands of goldenrod, the source of the
late-summer honey flow, have turned a nebulous silver, like wool caught on barbed wire. I took a few frames of honey for the
house but left most of it for the bees because it’s a new hive and, again, because I have no way of knowing how bad this winter
will get.

At dusk I stand in the door of the hayloft and look out over the place, at the ridgeline newly visible behind a copse of birches
to the west, at the row of denuded sugar maples that ring the pasture. The moon has already risen into a bank of thin clouds
that look tinged by firelight, clouds the color of the dogwood leaves. The horses in the barnyard below me show the whites
of their eyes while dismantling a hay bale. They’ve been slow to hair up for the season, but now their coats are coming on
strong. On the way to the house, I notice that the leaves on the peach trees haven’t turned. They’re still the green of midsummer.
Is this an omen? Will this be a balmy winter after all? Or does it mean I should provision the larder—a phrase with a satisfying
sound—for the snowbound weeks ahead? I just don’t know.

T
his time of year the light is always coming and going. Dawn swells until noon, and then, after a brief hesitation, twilight
takes over. The sun edges around the day like a fox making homeward tracks along the margin of a snow-covered field. Summer,
in memory, seems almost like a plain of sunshine, without undulation. There’s an astronomical explanation for it all—the sun
cuts a much lower angle across the sky in late autumn and sets farther south. But it’s simpler to say that at this time of
year, in the country at least, emotion and light are one and the same.

This is never truer than on a dark November morning well before sunrise. A few days ago a freezing rain fell. The day began
with the clatter of ice pellets against the windows. It sounded like crows dancing on the skylight. The falling ice was colorless,
almost invisible against the thicket of bare woods. But by evening the freezing rain had turned to snow, and before long six
inches had fallen over a glaze of ice.

By early Monday morning the balance of light had changed completely. All the dark, difficult textures of earth—the matted
bogs, the serrated fields—had been smoothed over, simplified. What seemed before to entangle the light now reflected it. Even
at five-thirty on an overcast morning the snow seemed to phosphoresce, to reveal the broad contours of the landscape while
concealing its subtlest variations. Even in darkness, driving south, I could sense the snowlit dimension of the long north-south
corridors of Columbia County.

In the valley that Route 22 follows, each light seemed to weigh in with a different mood. Halogen lamps on a weekend estate
picked out every wrinkle in their field of view. The kitchen windows of a farmhouse burned with an old-fashioned, amber glow.
Beyond the farmhouse shone a long bank of lights—the windows of a milking parlor filled with cows grazing at their stanchions,
the hiss of the milking machines almost audible in the silence outside, where the barn threw its light on the snow.

O
ur neighbors across the road had to put their dog down a couple of weeks ago. Her name was Molly, and the X rays gave her
no hope. For as long as we’ve lived here, Molly and her owners drove the half mile from their house up the highway and onto
our gravel road to feed their horses. Molly rode in the back of the pickup and barked the whole way, coming and going, setting
our dogs off every afternoon. Molly was a gong sounding day after day, tipping us toward evening. Our dogs would begin to
clamor for dinner—sharp stares, deep sighs, contagious grins—and once it was time for their dinner, it was time to feed the
horses and the cats and then, eventually, ourselves.

Days in the country can seem formless this time of year. The day’s only shape comes from the light and the weather. The rest is self-discipline, willing yourself to work, willing yourself outdoors into the cold and, increasingly, the darkness.
It took a while up here before I could walk down to the barn at night without feeling my skin prickle. At those moments I
knew what it felt like to be one of our horses, who take sudden frights in the daytime just for the fun of it. The nearest
predator is a birch tree hanging over the barnyard, but the horses always believe the worst. I’ve learned to trust them entirely
at night. Their stolidity reassures me now when I walk down to the barn in the blackness. They shift quietly from one foot
to another, ease in and out of the run-in shed. They remind me that everything is just as I left it in the light.

When I went out the door last night, it was snowing hard in full darkness, and I was late. The horses were still in the pasture,
trying to stand in each other’s wind-shadow. They followed me down to the barn and settled around their hay feeder like a
foursome returning to a long-standing game of bridge. Badger, the barn dog, watched us from his kennel. I let him out and
we walked up onto the hill that overlooks the barn, the bare maples in silhouette against the barn lights and the falling
snow. Another light burned near the pasture gate, and snow seemed to fall only around the edges of the bright globe the lamp
cast into the darkness.

Why Badger lives at the barn is another story, a long one. He’s a big dog, half Airedale, half Australian shepherd, and the
stream of life flows right through him. When I’m with him I feel like a tributary of that stream. We tromped around in the
darkness, the grass crusting with frost and yet softening with snow. This morning we walked up the road and investigated every overnight track. With new snow on the ground, it was as though I
could see, for once, what Badger was smelling. He swiveled along the trail of the big fox who lives near here until we cut
across a set of deer tracks making for a break in the fence. Once or twice a hunter’s gun went off in the distance. We got
home before the sun rose.

T
o judge by house and yard decorations in the country, Halloween has spilled over its banks and washed away all of October
and much of November. In cities the Christmas season as we know it now—an economic indicator with colored lights and eggnog—can
no longer be confined, as it used to be, within the month that begins on the day after Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving sticks
strictly to its allotted Thursday, and the power of this quiet holiday is evident in the trouble so many of us go through
to get home in time to honor it. There’s something touching about a feast of thanks at which we all find our own reasons to
be thankful, in which the feeling is named but not the cause.

The year is getting old and the light weak by the time Thanksgiving comes. The only color in the woods is the green of damp
moss and the bright orange berries of bittersweet. There are historic reasons why Thanksgiving falls when it does—matters
of Pilgrim fact and presidential proclamation—but over time it’s become the holiday that defines this bare season. By the
end of the eleventh month, the year is ancient enough to have shown us its wisdom. We know what to be grateful for by now,
or gratitude is simply beyond us.

You don’t have to be very old to remember Thanksgivings that began at four or five in the morning, when women rose alone in
the dark to start cooking the turkey. By the time the men and children got out of bed, the bird had already been roasting
for a couple of hours on the back porch in its own enameled turkey roaster, a device that lived in the basement all but one
day a year, resembled an electric bassinet, and kept the main oven free for pies. Thanksgiving then meant haste in the early
hours, a long delay before the big midafternoon dinner, and scratch meals—why eat now?—for breakfast and lunch, a day in which
you went straight from starvation to stupefaction, in which men and children felt more than ordinarily useless whenever they
came near the kitchen.