The Rural Life (4 page)

J
ust now at home a certain winter weariness sets in. Every morning and evening I can feel the sun pushing back the margins of night. It’s a dull soul who hasn’t checked sunrise or sunset against his watch several times by now, struck by how early the light comes and how late it begins to go. But that just makes a day of heavy overcast and freezing rain feel all the worse, more of an impairment than it would have been when the sodden year was still shrinking. The rain falls as it has all winter, over ice and snow, as if to make a none-too-subtle point about the climate in this part of New York State, a point that those of us who live here start to take seriously only about now.

The rain falls on frozen ground, and the barnyard looks medieval, a vile compost tea in every puddle. At the bird feeders it looks as though we’re running a goldfinch feedlot. Sullen birds shoulder each other aside and seem to squabble more than finches ordinarily do, which is constantly. The other day a mob of robins appeared in the lower pasture on a southeastern slope where the ice cap had retreated. They moved like shore-birds across the frozen turf, staggering forward and falling back, not just that lone bird—the first robin, sign of spring—but a herd, as though there wouldn’t be enough assurance in the sight of only one.

I filled the horses’ water tank the other morning, and as I did a pileated woodpecker cut across the hillside with a cry of demented hilarity. On dry, cold mornings, the woodpecker goes to work at early light, knocking a row of holes in a hollow tree trunk, waking the woods from hibernation, raising the sap in the sugar maples. The pileated woodpecker forecasts nothing, as far as I can tell. It lives here year round, and its plumage doesn’t seem to change, nor does its lunatic cry. Before long, another woodpecker will begin trying to drill through the metal roof of the barn the way it did last year. It will sound as though the world were an empty fifty-five-gallon drum with only the bird on the outside, hammering away. The racket puzzles even the crows in the ash trees.

One day soon the rain will let up, and the frost will leave the ground as stealthily as it came. There will be yielding all around and a sudden insistent adhesion in the barnyard. The urge to clean away winter from the corners of the lawn, from the deep shade beneath the hemlocks, will become irresistible. But all of this hides somewhere on the next page of the calendar. The good news now lies deep within the beehive, where the workers, their dead cast aside into the melting snow, have set the queen laying eggs once again.

I
n the midnineties New England winters had an old-fashioned rigor about them—plenty of snow and temperatures cold enough to make life before central heating look improbable. This winter has lacked that elemental sternness. The bitter weather that stupefied the Plains states largely bypassed New England, which has experienced episodes of balminess. Once or twice the mercury has dipped below zero, and snow has fallen, but to little purpose. What made this winter unusual was ice. In a truly hard winter, ice is something of a scarcity. It appears in all the predictable spots—on rivers, lakes, and ponds—but it’s often abraded by wind or covered by drifts. The snowpack in a frigid winter feels almost arid, and moisture is locked up tight. Not so this winter. Days were warm, nights cold, rain almost as likely as snow. Every afternoon the world liquefied a little, and every morning the world was freshly plated in ice.

The roads weren’t the problem. Dead level roads are rare in New England. But during January and February, every parking lot or driveway seemed to be a catch basin for the surrounding hillsides, which meant that every parking lot or driveway was a sheet of ice. When the surface of the ice melted in the afternoon, it engulfed the sand that was spread on it the night before. Spreading salt, like tempering steel, only seemed to create a superior grade of ice. All across New England, drivers walked to their vehicles in a gingerly manner, clutching every handhold in sight, only to find themselves stuck on slick, level pavement, often in their own driveways. Some drivers tried to ease off the ice. Some tried to burn rubber right through to the asphalt. In a frictionless universe, nearly everyone would be irascible nearly all of the time.

The ice was beautiful, though it’s a beauty most people had had enough of by mid-January. Out in the fields, where the hollows filled with water and froze over, strange vacancies seemed to interrupt the continuity of the landscape. In the rivers, the frazil ice came and went a dozen times. On Dublin Lake, New Hampshire, one arctic morning, I watched a stiff west wind stalemate the closing ice, the whitecaps freezing even as they blew onto a stiffening shelf of frost. And when a light snow fell, just dusting the driveway, it was almost impossible not to admire how slick and unyielding ice can really be. But now the moles are throwing up fresh mounds of dirt. Traction has returned.

I
t’s been as ugly here as open, undisturbed country ever gets. One day early last week the temperature reached forty-seven in the afternoon, with steady rain. The ground was frozen and still partly covered by snow, which had turned porous and grainy. A dense vapor clung to the tops of the snowbanks. Water ran in thin, scalloped rivulets across tarred roads. It streamed across the earth and pooled in every depression, where it stayed because it had nowhere to go. In every ditch, every hollow, a cold, sepia brew of last year’s leaves was steeping in a basin of discolored ice. I found myself staring into the tangled woods, wondering why humans had never learned to hibernate and whether it was too late to think again.

There’s a limit to how ugly Manhattan gets in that kind of weather. The light can only fail so far in the rain before buildings begin to glisten. The city never feels quite so immense or so familiar as when the fog closes in. But on a cold, wet night here on the edge of the woods, the opacity is shocking. This isn’t the deep sky darkness of December or January, when the emptiness of space seems to reach right down to the horizon. This feels like some suffocating, damp antithesis.

And still, a few days ago the ground was frozen solid. On late October mornings, when the grass suffers a brittle frost, the earth remains soft, though you can feel it tightening underfoot. Now conditions were reversed. In the fields the long grass looked like Ophelia’s hair, caught by the current in which she drowned. Yet there was nothing pliant about the earth to which it was rooted. No give at all.

On Thursday, all at once, the soil would take the print of a foot. Not a deep print. As I walked I could feel a thin layer of soil sliding over the frostbound dirt beneath it, like the flesh of the forehead over the skull. By the weekend walking was treacherous, mud over shoes in the wet spots. On drier ground there was suddenly a remarkable sense of leniency. The soil felt almost buoyant, like a gymnast’s mat. It invited a fall.

You often hear mud season reviled up here, though no one really misses a bitter winter like this one now passing into memory. In these tentative days at the end of February and the start of March, people talk as though the snow were simply in remission. But when the frost starts to go out of the ground, when even a day with heavy fog holds the light longer than a clear day in late December, I realize that I’ve thought of winter all along as the still point in the rotation of the seasons. Well, nothing is still any longer. This corner of the planet is melting, and we’ll be up to the axles in it any day now.

W
hen the snow went away—in a rush, just as it came—it left behind the lawn, the garden, the pastures, the barnyard. It also left behind locust pods, fallen branches, last fall’s leaves, snowplow scrapings, mire, and muck—the debris of a disordered season. The snow’s erasure has itself been erased. Everything is matted to the earth or anchored in the mud except the ridges an eastern mole has made while tunneling round and round. The early bulbs seem desperate just now. Nothing else catches the hint of spring from them.

Yet the woods look no more disordered than they ever do. Chaos is always thriving just beyond the tree line. Downed limbs wrestle with understory thatch. Birches whose crowns snapped in high wind this winter stand rigid, wounds bright, crowns still waiting for the next high wind to force them all the way to the ground. Somehow that indiscriminate tangle, the mass of all that bare timber, makes spring seem like a betting proposition at best.

I know that there’s an underlying order in the woods. What makes it hard to see is its intricacy and its time scale. Any number of interlocking communities dwell in what the eye sums up as a single disarray. All those metabolisms, cross-conspiring, begin to slip out of dormancy about now. The slow fires of decomposition and new growth begin to burn with equal energy. One of the ways to see the order in the woods is to look not at the stands of hemlock or white pine or at the indiscriminate saplings springing up in an abandoned field. The way to see it is to look at the gaps in even the most knotted vegetation. I imagine each of those gaps—the hollow under a bank of snow-matted goldenrod, for instance—as an ecological niche, whose occupants go unseen, who live and die in their own time, unconnected to mine.

That’s an optimistic outlook, though it may not sound like it. Gardening at the edge of wildness, I’m able to impose order on nature only so far—a few hundred feet from the house at best. The horses help. They keep the pastures clean-limbed. They like a clear line of sight as much as I do. But in the garden itself—that one word standing in mid-March for a string of murky beds and bare dirt—the purpose is to create a reordering of the wild order, a place of redistributed complexity with an overlying, plainly perceptible simplicity. It will always take imagination to see it at this time of year.

Meanwhile there are all those pods from the honey locust tree. They’re lying everywhere, curved, gloss-brown slivers a foot long. People say that cattle love to eat ground-up locust pods. Living in the country you learn to spend money in the meanest ways, and you also learn the most extravagant parsimony. I’m going to rake up all those pods this weekend. I won’t be able to burn them or compost them or throw them away. The thought that cattle would eat them will haunt me until I end up getting cattle.