The Rural Life (26 page)

Sitting down to the big meal seems like the crux of Thanksgiving, but it really comes a couple of hours later. The pumpkin
pie is gone, the dishes are done, the dogs and overnight guests are napping, and there’s a strange vacancy in the afternoon
light. For a moment the year halts, a moment when the wakeful aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. In that instant,
that hollow in time, you find yourself listening to the unnatural stillness of the afternoon, pausing to look closely at the
world around you. That’s all the celebration necessary on this most modest, most poignant of days.

I
n late August what snow remains along the ridgelines of the Madison Range, in southwestern Montana, is as gray as a cast antler,
and it has the porosity of cruelly weathered bone, almost eaten away by sun and wind and age. Still it’s hard not to think
of those snowfields as the nucleus from which winter will come, spreading downward in the night, taking the unprepared unawares
and bestowing a kind of small-town smugness on those who got their snowblowers tuned up in July. Seasonal morals—think of
the grasshopper and the ant—echo down through folk literature, through the commonplaces of our tongue, but no season carries
a sterner moral than winter, and what makes it so is snow.

Some people love waking to the sight of new snow. Fallen snow is fine, but I like the sight of it falling, fine as dust or
so fat you can hear it land against the kitchen window. I like the tunnel of dry snow you drive through at night, the headlights
blanking out a few yards ahead, and the feeling that you’re driving into some abyssal vacuum. I like the ground-blizzards
and the snow that slithers down the road ahead of you. What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it
obscures some things and defines others, like the wind.

My grandmother Carley always used to say to me, when I was in one of my childhood snow reveries, “You won’t feel that way
when you’re my age.” I’m halfway there now, and nothing’s changed. I suppose someday I’ll feel tyrannized by snow, but the
truest and the most consistent of all the feelings I’ve ever felt is the one I feel when I look up on a gray day in early
December and see that out the window the air has filled with snow, snow as still, as hesitant, as the motes of dust in a morning
sunbeam.

It reminds me of a classroom in an old brick school building in Osage, Iowa. There was only one small window, mounted high
on the wall near the top of a set of stairs that led down to a dank gymnasium. Through that high window I could see the boughs
of some conifer, a Scotch pine or a Norway spruce. Whenever snow begins to fall, wherever I am, I’m in that schoolroom again,
watching the flakes balanced in the air against the dark green boughs, waiting for them to thicken and for the wind to multiply
them until the snow is so thick that the tree fades from sight, and we’re sent home early. The snow fills in our tracks so
swiftly that it’s doubtful we’ll ever find our way back to school, not tomorrow or the day after or for weeks to come.

T
he urge to quarter the year into seasons is nearly irresistible, whether the impulse is astronomical, agricultural, liturgical,
or fiscal. Instead of inhabiting the undivided plain of time, humans prefer to live in the rooms the seasons make, and nearly
everyone loves to be reminded of that fact. There’s something gratifying about seeing fall, winter, spring, and summer, the
very idea of seasonality, represented, no matter how—in a Herrick poem or a Boucher painting or in the stiff vellum pages
of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The pleasure of it is so strong that it must be adaptive, a way of preparing a biological
affinity in us for what the calendar inevitably holds in store.

But portraits of the seasons give a tight, iconic view of nature. Winter doesn’t howl into the last stanza of Keats’s autumn,
stunning the gnats and swallows, nor does it frostbite the naked toes of Botticelli’s vernal nymphs. Reality is less discrete.
There isn’t a secular hymn to a day of unseasonable warmth on the cusp of winter shortly after heavy rain in an otherwise
dry autumn, though days like that do come along. The only season Boucher never painted was the one called mud. We live in
fact in a world of margins—every hour an occasion of its own—where sometimes the weather and the landscape and the state of
the foliage live up to the idea of the very season we say is at hand.

Like most people I’ve been waiting for the big arctic blow to begin—a dark whistling high in the treetops—and while waiting
I’ve been visiting the plants that surround the house. They divide into two camps. Some insist on fall and winter, like buckthorn,
hung with nearly black berries, and eastern wahoo, a tree whose small, lobed fruits are a mordant pink. But most of the plants
I stopped to quiz—climbing roses, elderberry, lilacs, azaleas, rhododendron, blueberries, wisteria, a lone magnolia—are looking
patiently toward spring. Dormant buds, covered in bud scales, have already formed in axils and on twigs.

I had always thought of this time of year as a slow patch of death, of stasis at least, in the plant world. That’s the sort
of thing you believe when you take the idea of season too literally. The mild fall weather may have swollen the buds a little
more than usual, but what it really did was drive me outdoors to notice them. There, at the end of autumn, stood the whole
shape of spring, held back only by the still-dwindling daylight, by a keen, continuous apprehension of time.

U
p past Pipestone, Minnesota, Highway 23 angles away to the north-northeast, through Lyon, Yellow Medicine, and Chippewa Counties,
and through the heart of what for twelve years in the mid-nineteenth century was the Dakota Reservation and before that the
Dakota homeland. The last time I was there, it had snowed a couple of days earlier, and the highway was a patchwork of dry
pavement and hard, rutted ice, where drifting snow had blown across the asphalt in a warm southern wind and frozen overnight.
But now the wind was changing. Second by second the balance of brightness shifted back and forth between the overcast sky
and the snow-glazed earth, like flakes of mica mirroring each other.

I had flown over this country two days earlier, and nothing seemed to be moving below me, nothing large enough to leave a
track through new-fallen snow. The landscape was nearly as still from the highway. Snowmobiles had run along the ditches,
and steers had in some places been turned out into the cornfields, but those were the only signs of movement.

Except for the wind. One family on a farm outside Clara City had put a life-sized Santa Claus on a telephone pole, arms and
legs wrapped around it as though Santa were hanging on to keep the prevailing wind from blowing him away like so much topsoil.
It was no exaggeration. On the farm I had come to visit, we walked between the house and the sow barn with all the haste we
could muster, heads bowed, talking only in the lee. The temperature had already fallen twenty degrees that day, and it was
still going down, dropping as fast, it seemed, as the second hand on its way toward six.

I was supposed to return to that farm for supper. I left the motel in the early darkness and headed west out of Willmar, in
Kandiyohi County. The wind had risen even higher and was now on its hind legs, a steady gale out of the northwest, and with
the rising wind the snow rose too. Sometimes I could see the sulfur glow of lights on a turkey barn or the double halo of
approaching headlights. Then the snow thickened, and the highway disappeared into the nullifying glare of my own headlights.
Six miles outside of town, in an unbroken whiteout, I turned around.

It was the first time I ever felt the vertigo that settlers often felt when they first came to the prairie. There are many
descriptions of it, but here’s what I understood. When the wind blows from the northwest in western Minnesota, it blows from
infinity. Northwest is the one direction that goes on forever there, without any barriers, beyond the indiscernible horizon
and away to the arctic. Most of the fence lines are gone in that cash-grain country, and there’s no such thing as a tree line,
no rimrock or buttes to hold in the landscape. There’s only the sound of the wind skirling down with its endless driven snows
upon you.

T
he snow that fell at home this past weekend was a predatory snow, heavy, wet, and punishing. It fell hastily, clumsily, and
by the time the storm ended, there was as much precipitation stacked overhead in the tangled woods, waiting to precipitate,
as there was on the ground. It looked as though someone had turned up the planet’s gravity during the night. Under the weight
of the snow, every tree, every bush, every wire in sight, bowed closer to the earth than it did the day before. Dead limbs
snapped under the strain and so did live ones.

The day after the storm—Sunday—was clear and warm, but snow continued to fall. The sun probed the woods, and limb by limb,
twig by twig, the tree crowns began to shed their burdens. The conifers whose boughs cant downward naturally emptied themselves
first, and then, as the wind began to stir, the rest of the trees joined in. The falling snow sounded like an intermittent
rain of small rodents falling on the skylights. Out in the woods the dull concussion of wet snow landing in wet snow was audible
everywhere, accompanied by the groan of a black birch or a red maple and the sound of snowmelt running downstream. Every clod
that fell from overhead trailed behind it a column of snowflakes hesitating in the sun. For a while, near noon, the air seemed
overcharged with brightness.

But by evening the comfortable gloom of December had returned. Nearly all the snow in the treetops had slipped away, and with
it the illusion that daylight had somehow been trapped in the canopy above. The woods had reerected themselves. Sunset came
and went, and all the color in the natural landscape drained away with it. Blue Christmas bulbs strung along the gables of
an old farmhouse, or the orange glow of an incandescent lamp seen through a roadside window at twilight, made it plain how
utterly the world had been reduced to black and white. The cold came on a little deeper that night, and in the morning the
snow on the woodpile was spiked with frost.