The Rural Life (7 page)

Last week, between New Lebanon and Petersburg, New York, Route 22 was an asphalt strip cut right through the natural year.
On the highest hills, snow had fallen overnight, clinging to every branch. On the middle slopes, the trees that had begun
to blossom looked like plumes of smoke, little different from the smoke that rose from burning leaf piles along the ditches.
The Hoosic River had risen to near flooding. In the deepest stretches its waters were thoroughly soiled, but in the shallows
they had turned a chalky aquamarine, the color of oxidized siding on a mobile home. In the cornfields, filled with last year’s
stubble, the first speculative tire tracks had been laid by tractors, which had then turned home because of the damp. Some
fields were still covered with an autumnal thatch, while others had sprung so green I almost longed to be put out to pasture.

If the first iris spears and the purple tips of lilac buds still seemed tentative somehow, the birds did not. Robins bombed
across the highway only a few feet above its surface. Cardinals took a higher, fluttering path. Turkeys hoping to cross the
road collected by twos in the ditches and then departed with a flight that angled steeply upward to end in a distant tree.
Crows seemed to hop straight down from the sky to investigate some roadside carnage. From the marshes, I could hear the cackling
of red-winged blackbirds. Down among the cattle and horses, which were shedding great strips of winter fur, the cowbirds had
returned. The head of a male cowbird is matte chocolate brown, and its body is a deep, night-bright, iridescent black. Trying
to stare at the place where those two colors meet evokes a memory that has no name.

Inevitably I search for defining moments at this time of year. Is it the coming of dandelions? The tribe of vultures that
gathers in the updrafts? The molting of goldfinches? The hopeful plots of bare dirt—future gardens—newly cut into lawns? In
this part of the world each day seems to bring a different, contradictory season. But everything points to the first rhubarb
pie.

I
n Manhattan the beauty of the night sky is only a faded metaphor, the shopworn verse of an outdated love song. The stars shine no brighter at midnight in midtown than the ones on the old time-dimmed ceiling of the waiting room at Grand Central Station. But sometimes it’s possible, even in Manhattan, to see the evening star—Venus—descending in the west, presenting her orbit, edgewise, to viewers on Earth. Venus is the luminous body hanging low over New Jersey in the early evening, brighter than any heavenly object visible from Earth except the sun and moon. Every night people go to bed wondering what strangely bright star that is, and then they’re overtaken by sleep. In the morning no one remembers the question.

Sometimes you can almost picture the motion of Venus in its orbit, as if you were looking at a diagram of the solar system. Imagine a line between the sun, at sunset, and Venus, glittering high above the horizon. That’s the line of Venus’s orbit. When Venus moves toward Earth, it’s the evening star, and when it moves away from Earth, it becomes the morning star. The moment of transition occurs when Venus passes between the sun and Earth. As the year wears on, Venus appears nearer and nearer the sun, until the planet is engulfed by twilight, and then, before long, Venus will come back into view, at dawn. For now, the evening star—Hesperus, as it was anciently known—is a steadily waning crescent, no matter how starlike or globular its light appears.

To say, as you must, that Venus is not a star but a planet seems ungrateful somehow, almost pedantic. That’s the kind of technicality Charles Lamb had in mind when defending his personal ignorance almost two hundred years ago. “I guess at Venus,” he wrote, “only by her brightness.” Lamb was no Copernican, and neither are most of us. We are little Ptolemies every one. The sun rises and sets upon us while the earth remains fixed beneath our feet. When you lie in a meadow, deep in country, late at night, etherized by the fullness of the sky, it’s all you can do to imagine the simplest of celestial motions: the pivoting of constellations around the North Star. To impart to each point of light the motions proper to it—to do the calculus of all those interfering rotations, those intersecting gravities—is simply impossible. It’s easier just to imagine that you’re staring at the ceiling of a celestial waiting room.

L
ast weekend I woke up at four in the morning to the smell of rain. Perhaps it was a dream scent. Perhaps a few drops really fell, enough to remind me that the smell of rain is the catalyzed smell of the local earth and everything on it. By the time I got up for good, the ground was as dry as it was when I went to bed, a month dry, after a month without any precipitation. Dust rises from the horses’ hooves when they run across the pasture. Manure dries the way it does in Colorado, to half its weight, then half of that in a day or two. A storm gathered later that afternoon, portentous clouds, and then, as a neighbor with a computerized weather station reported, there came nine-hundredths of an inch, just enough to leaven the upper layer of dust. We have what might be called a big-gulp rain gauge, and it registered no such thing.

A spring like this teaches people to see a prescience in nature, no matter how skeptical they are. All that snow lying so late into March and April turns out to have been lying there for a reason, to alleviate this long dry spell. Beneath a dry inch or two, the soil is still moist. Mud season lasted only a few hours this year because the melt came so gradually, a sign that the runoff was being slowly, deeply banked in the soil instead of being sluiced away downstream, down-ditch, down-gully.

The snow disappeared more than a month ago, but I’m still noticing its effects. What remained of the vegetable gardens was mashed flat. In places it looked as if winter had gone through with a stiff brush and a bottle of brilliantine. Winter may have been deep, but it was also soft, and that seems to have suited some species exactly.

The garlic has never grown so well. Nearly every flowering tree and shrub has mocked the memory of other springs with sheer proliferation of blossoms. A week after the snow left, I started seeing tiny seedlings everywhere—in the garden, across the lawn, throughout the pasture. They looked as if they’d been thickly broadcast by someone with a sure hand. Their seed leaves were dark green, but the first true leaves had a metallic glint that gave them away. They were sugar maples. Every samara that fell last year seems to have taken root. We now live in the middle of a forest that’s three inches tall. When the sun sets, it catches the tint of the seedling maple leaves and the pasture turns bronze.

T
he oldest cottonwoods along the Bighorn River have fissured bark nearly as deep as my palm is wide, and where cattle have rubbed against them their bark is pale. Morels grow in the new grass beneath the cottonwoods. To hunt for morels is to remember something unsettling about the task of looking. One day last week I searched the partial shade of each tree along a quartermile of riverbank, and as I did I tried to concentrate on seeing the fawn-brown cranial effusion that is a morel. But concentrating didn’t make the morels appear. They were there or not there, and nothing could induce them to surface where they weren’t.

On a bright day a few trout are visible from a high bank—wisps of movement against a dark green background, more angular and better camouflaged than the undulating filaments of aquatic weed that wash downstream. But to some anglers a fish is truly visible only when it rises and feeds. Sometimes trout shoulder the river aside, and sometimes they barely crease it, taking a cluster of midges sliding past on the water’s tension, as light as thought. Most of the time the fish adhere to the stream bottom, waiting, feeding in the subsurface drift.

Until the fish rise I wait too. In slack current, rafts of goslings test the water, their parents, like tugboats, nudging them this way and that. Everywhere there is the racket of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds, the high-ceilinged squawk of pheasants, the wet slap of mergansers’ wings on takeoff. Green hills climb in the distance, level off, and become wheat and barley fields, private inholdings on the Crow Reservation.

Then a morning comes when the wind has died and clouds have hidden the sun at last. The thing that will make the trout appear from nowhere is about to happen. The nymphs of a species of mayfly—
Baetis tricaudatus
—will rise through the water column and hatch on its surface, and the trout will rise with them.

In midafternoon the mayflies are not there, no matter how hard I look, and then a minute later they are. It’s as though morels erupted from the grass while I watched, beneath every cottonwood and as far as the eye can see. The mayflies are the same color as the river’s dull surface, their wings canted upstream over slender bodies. They drift into view no matter where I look, and coming into view among them are the heads of brown trout and rainbows, suddenly visible at last.

I tried, with friends that night, to estimate how many
Baetis
hatched during the single hour of their emergence. Even the most conservative number looked improbable, and the probable number was unimaginable to us all.

I
t’s taken me nearly thirty years—the thirty years since my mother died—to learn that what I miss the most about her is her voice. I can hear it, but I can’t tell you much about it beyond what most people know of a mother’s voice—that in childhood it fell like consoling shade on a hot ear. So much—the sound of her talking—I missed from the first. More and more, I lack the very way she talked, unadorned and ordinary as it was.

My mother’s mother said “pie-anna” for “piano.” Like her daughter, she sat at that instrument in the intervals of housework and played hymns. Her voice had the reediness that comes to the throat after a hard life. I know a lot about my grandmother, but they’re things a child knows, not adult information. I don’t know a single sentence her parents ever said to her.

My mom learned in school not to say “pie-anna,” and I would wager that she never once used a phrase that was uniquely hers. She spoke, as we all do, a temporal dialect—a speech made up in the main of plain, enduring words, but also of short-lived phrases that belong to a place and a moment. My dad, for instance, knows all the expressions that mark him as a man who has lived through the eighties and nineties. To “go for it” doesn’t mean to him what it would have meant to my mom. If I had told her to “go for it,” she would have asked what “it” was, where it was usually kept, and why I couldn’t get it myself.