Perfection of the Morning (8 page)

And I was still reveling in the freedom of my new life despite the inevitable loneliness, and in the real balm for the heart and soul of waking each morning to birdsong and the open sky, and going to bed each night listening to the muted croak of the nighthawk and the distant, melodious choir of coyote voices. Submerged in the truly wondrous present, and surrounded by a community of which most of the members in their newfound prosperity seemed to have no worries, I didn’t think much about the future, either for myself or for them.

Instead, I found solace in the extraordinary beauty of the land itself. On a warm spring day riding a horse, walking or traveling in a truck across true shortgrass prairie that had never known a plow in all its history since the glaciers, I thought I had never smelled anything so wonderful in my life: sage and grasses mixed with sunlight, carried on the light fresh air as it swept freely across miles of unbroken grass.

Peter taught me to see the grassland through his eyes and to love it as he did. If native grassland was disappearing from the farms all around us, Peter hung on even more fiercely to all he had control of that had never been broken since the soil was deposited by the glaciers in the previous geological era. I had, and still have, all the prairie wilderness I need to look at and walk on and, as the years of my new life here have passed, that land has become more important to me than I would ever have thought possible.

Because I was alone a great deal, still had no close friends to visit and not much housework, and I could only read or write so much, walking had long since become part of my daily routine. I walked every day, I told people, to keep fit; in my heart I knew I was using walking as a reason to be outdoors since, aside from my small and usually unsuccessful garden (with the short growing season, the fierce summer heat, the constant, killing wind and the poor soil, I was having to learn to garden all over again), and my occasional days spent out riding with Peter, I had no other practical reason to spend an hour or two in Nature each day.

Walking was a way to pass the time, to familiarize myself at a deep level with my new environment, to enjoy what was fast becoming to me the best thing in my new life—the landscape. It didn’t require a membership, social skills or specialized skills, companions, a vehicle, money, a weapon, or even a special costume. All I had to do was open the door, pick a direction and start walking. I had to be careful to avoid fields I knew had bulls in them, or in the spring especially, cows with new calves, but on such a big place this was easy to do.

As time passed and I grew familiar with the landscape and the small landmarks on it, my walks grew less aimless. When I left the house, I usually had a destination in mind: a rock, a spot on the riverbank, a particular coulee, or just a stretch of country road that was especially isolated where I almost never encountered a vehicle. I became familiar with each field within walking distance of either house. Some fields I liked better than others to walk in because the view was better, or I always saw antelope there, or it seemed to me I felt better there. Each field had its own character.

There is a place in one of the fields at the ranch, though, which I always hated riding in because whenever we were there I could feel
my horse tensing, changing his steady gait to an uneven prance and throwing his head, resisting my direction. I could feel him wanting to break into a gallop, or to rear and, expecting at any second to be bucked off or to fall as he bolted, I tightened my legs and shortened the reins, and talked to him, as Peter had taught me to do.

The only reason I could think of for this strange behavior was the way the wind swept down through a break in the hills right there, reaching us across twenty miles of uninhabited grassland, and I thought he must catch its scent of wilderness and freedom coming through that long draw down the fields. Once past that stretch of land, he would settle down. Although that field always affected my horse, it affected me not at all, and I’ve never bothered going there to walk.

But the field that seemed different to me is a quarter section of native grassland with the nearest human dwelling only a mile away. I remember walking there once during the first summer I spent here and I continued to go there, although not very often since it’s some distance from the house, because it is so much more pleasant to walk in wilderness than down a country road. And for a long time—years—I tended to hold that field in reserve for the days when it felt right to go there, not that I could explain what that means, other than that, I see now, it had a different and puzzling feel to it, which caused me to approach it in a less offhand way.

Since the Butalas had bought it, it had rarely been grazed by cattle and, since it was too steep and stony to break for farming, it has remained very much the way it had been since the melting of the last glaciers. In time, going there became a special pleasure because of that exhilarating, gritty
feel
to the air there, and because I had learned to find in a landscape which most might find chillingly sparse and uneventful, a unique beauty. I attributed my desire to be
there to the taint of wildness I could feel, although why I should have felt it there more than in any of the other fields I walked in I didn’t know. But of all the land Peter owned, it became my favorite place to walk.

Occasionally, during the first year, I would take a book with me, intending to sit on the grass far from any signs of the presence of humans, and read. I did this because I thought I might otherwise be bored, I suppose, because of all those years at the university where I was never without a book. I found, and this greatly surprised me, that reading was boring in the middle of such splendor—splendor that saturated all the senses, not merely the vision—that reading was clearly meaningless in this context. I needed only the prairie, I discovered, whether I saw wildlife or not, whether a flower bloomed in a ten-mile radius or not. Just the ground, the feel of it underfoot, the thin cover of club moss and wild grasses, the stones, these were enough—more than enough.

In that particular stony field I learned much that I had not dreamt of before it began to teach me; I had experiences there that changed my life. In time these strange things that began to happen to me when I was out on the prairie, not only in that particular field, but in others as well, began to come together for me to gradually form a shadowy but increasingly powerful whole. I was discovering something about living in Nature that I had never heard anyone speak of, or read in any books, though it might have been in some of them if I’d had the eyes to read it there.

Many of my writer friends who love to spend time in Nature have their own numinous experiences to tell me of as we walk together or lie on the grass watching the sky: communicating with wild animals, seeing things which aren’t there in the everyday sense, learning things from people who are not present, being flooded
with new understanding. I begin, despite official silence on the subject by much of religion and most scientists, to think such experiences are so widespread and frequent as to be the norm rather than the unusual. It seems inarguable to me that, as Erich Neumann wrote in “Mystical Man,” “Man is by nature a
homo mysticus.
”

I have said, “This is the place where words stop,” referring to that moment when, out in Nature, not shooting, collecting, studying, naming or farming, we realize that an entity is present, or that Nature is alive, even that Nature has a memory. I meant by this that suddenly there seem to be no words to describe adequately our experiences, no familiar phrases or colloquialisms to fall back on, no single nouns or verbs which have been given over to the sole purpose of describing such awareness.

I think we have so allowed the scientific approach to the world to take over our perceptions that we are afraid to mention such experiences for fear of being laughed at or vilified. When we do, we find ourselves stammering, struggling for words, never being able to convey in language to our own satisfaction exactly what it felt like or looked like or what sensations it evoked in us. We struggle against skepticism, our own as much as anyone else’s, and in time we lapse into silence about them and a whole, valuable dimension of human experience remains unsung and unvalidated.

It is hard not to be very angry with scientists for this loss. Their unshakable belief in a materialistic, purely objective world has so permeated our culture that only in religious life are we allowed the slightest latitude in the dimensions of what we might call the “real.” Scientists have specialized in narrowing experience, told us that the only truths possible are the ones they know; they have developed specialized languages the rest of us don’t understand and have elevated themselves, and been elevated by us, to the status of
those who
know,
while poets, visionaries and mystics have been relegated to the realm of the crazy.

We use words like “awareness,” “perception,” “sense,” or “intuition,” or a “sixth sense.” They are as close as our language, as far as I know, allows us to come to describe the way in which we apprehend experience that is out of the realm of the ordinary. None of these words seem quite sufficient. And as for describing the quality of the experience, its texture, color and the accompanying emotion, the way it permeates our being and floods us with new knowledge/awareness/perception, it seems to be impossible to find the right words and a way to structure them that will make our listeners believe us.

Until one has had an experience of this sort, one cannot
hear
what one who has had these experiences is saying. Those of us who allow these experiences room in our psyches, who do not refuse or deny them, know we are walking a narrow ledge with psychosis on one side and scientism on the other. It is a dangerous journey we gladly make, putting one foot carefully before the other, our arms out to maintain our balance, our concentration on the path absolute. The world is more wonderful than any of us have dared to guess, as all great poets have been telling us since the invention of poetry. To discover these truths we don’t need to scale Mount Everest or white-water raft the Colorado or take up skydiving. We need only go for walks.

I had been here five long years when I dreamt this dream: it was night, but so clear and bright it was almost as light out as during the day. I was standing inside the door of the back porch of the old ranch house. In the dream the door was divided in the center into an upper and a lower part which opened separately. I was looking out the open top half at the sky watching in awe and wonder a gigantic eagle as it soared over the ranch. It was so big that with its
wings outspread it covered the entire yard, which is about twenty fenced acres. It had a slender, stylized body and wings and it was a smooth, delicate pale gray. Its beauty was entrancing. Even now, remembering it, something in my viscera opens into an infinitude that frightens me.

In front of me, on the rectangle of cement at the door, stood an owl which was at least six feet tall. It was also a creature of stunning beauty, a pale brown with deep turquoise fan-shaped regularly spaced markings on its breast. The eagle soared above us and as I watched it, the owl watched me and repeatedly bumped its body against the door in front of me, which was not latched, as if it was trying to get into the porch with me. It wasn’t threatening and I wasn’t afraid. I simply glanced at it and kept it out while I watched the eagle.

I puzzled over the meaning of the dream. All I knew was that it was far too wonderful to be ignored or dismissed. I knew as well as I’d ever known anything that, although I had no idea how I would do it, I would have to find out what it meant. So beautiful, so mystical a dream must have something to do with the new life I was leading, but I did not know exactly what. I didn’t consciously know then how profoundly my move out of the urban, academic, feminist world into the country and rural life had shaken me. My very atoms would be rearranged. In time it would be a surprise to look in the mirror and see the same, if aging, face staring back at me, when the person inside felt utterly different.

My first year or two here as I began to settle in, during the time when I was still following Peter on his daily round of work and driving in the truck with him from ranch to hay farm and back again, I would awake in the morning, try to recall what we’d done the day before, and draw a complete blank. I would put my mind to it, giving myself clues: had we ridden horses? Had we been to town, any town? Had we visited neighbors? Nothing. It bewildered and frightened me to be completely unable to remember one thing about the previous day.

Then I would ask Peter; he would think for a minute before saying, “We loaded the cancer-eye cow and took her to the vet,” or, “We went riding,” or, “We fixed that cattle oiler.” Sometimes it took a second question about where the cattle oiler had been, or the cancer-eye cow, before day would come back to me. It was always a relief when I remembered something, no matter how small or how vaguely.

I struggled to understand. With my academic background in aspects of human behavior, I thought I ought to be able to understand the significance of my inability to remember. But at the same
time as I tried with various arguments to reassure myself that nothing serious was happening to my brain, I was undeniably frightened, especially on the days when nothing I suggested to myself would bring back one memory, not clear, not fuzzy, of the previous day. All I could come up with as an explanation was that for the previous four and more years I had been living in such a state of tension, under so much pressure day by day in my work and in my private life, that now, with the pressure off for the first time since I’d grown up, something inside me had let go, had left its post, had sat down on the job.

Besides this inexplicable forgetfulness, I felt guilty. It would be ten o’clock in the morning and I’d be wearing jeans, boots and a down-filled riding jacket, sitting in the truck beside Peter, daydreaming. I’d snap to attention thinking, I should be at work! before I’d remember that I didn’t have a job anymore, that for the first time since I was sixteen and had gotten my first job, I didn’t have to be anywhere and wasn’t about to get into trouble for not doing whatever I was supposed to be doing. Remembering that fact brought only relief, but an element of the guilt always remained because my sisters and women friends were still slogging away, going to a job every day, as was most of the world, while I was so fortunate that I no longer had to. Habit was so strong that it took a full year before that sense of guilt that lay behind everything I did slowly dissolved.

By then I was working part-time as a resource person in Special Education and I began to spend less time with Peter as he went about his daily round. I understood enough about his world now, I was no longer baffled by what it was he did all day, and I had learned that there were some things I liked to be a part of and some I didn’t. The sweetness of always being together was wearing off; we were becoming an old married couple. Although most of the
time I still was, neither of us any longer took it for granted that I would always be with him during the day.

Peter was forty-one when we married; he had not been married before, and he had led the life of the country bachelor for a long time. If I was going through a hard time adapting to my new marriage and lifestyle, Peter needed a few years to get used to the condition of being married, which meant thinking and living as a team. While his bachelorhood had made him wonderfully independent when it came to getting himself something to eat, buying groceries, generally looking after himself, for a long time after we were married he kept on thinking like a bachelor, so that I often felt like a guest, a welcome one, but a guest nevertheless, instead of a partner as other rural wives are.

If, on the one hand, I had little envy of the women who had moved from their father’s ranch or farm to the place they started with their husbands upon their marriage, missing the independence I’d known, on the other, I did envy them, because even if their names weren’t on the actual deed, they could feel the farm or ranch was as much theirs as their husbands’, because they had been there from the beginning. The place I lived on had been unbroken prairie when the Butalas first saw it; it had been in the Butala family for two generations. The world I’d stepped into I didn’t even understand, could help with very little, much less imagine running on my own. I could never feel myself an equal partner with my husband in the enterprise, and all of that contributed to my sense of being alien and, increasingly as the years passed, apologetic, because where I’d once been a valued member of my own small society, in this new life, I was slowly assimilating a sense of my own uselessness.

And, of course, I hadn’t reckoned with another fact of rural life, which is that the daughter-in-law has to earn her way into the family
into which she’s married, that other members of rural families are frequently grudging in their acceptance of her. This is, I think, usually at base a kind of xenophobia, difficulty in accepting a stranger into the midst of such close-knit families, a situation documented in cultures around the world. In some cases it seems to be tied to landownership, and the belief that a daughter-in-law is an intruder who has acquired property that without her would belong to the other family members, and the accompanying resentment because she has done nothing to earn it.

Peter’s friends were men; most of our visitors were men; day in and day out I was surrounded by men. Nearly all the daily conversation I listened to was man-talk: machinery, land, animals, farm economics. If on the one hand I was overwhelmed by the vast array of knowledge about the world men who led a life in agriculture had, on the other, I was frequently bored stiff and often resentful that I had been reduced to pouring coffee and cooking meals for them. Occasionally I told them jokingly that they were desperately boring; they just laughed with that easy and careless grace of the male landowner secure in his unchallenged supremacy in his world.

The women included me in their activities, helped me when I asked for help: one of them taught me to can peaches, others taught me better ways to sew; they gave me badly needed gardening advice; when Peter wasn’t around and they were talking about things having to do with farming and cattle that I didn’t understand, they explained. At dances and suppers when Peter was off with the other men, they came and sat beside me and talked to me so I wouldn’t feel alone. They invited me for coffee and they came to help, as they always had, when we were branding or rounding up or chasing cows. On the whole, I found them warm and kind. It was not their fault that this huge gap existed between us.

By the time I had been here a couple of years I was more at ease with the women. That is, I was friendly with five or six women to the extent that I was glad to see them, happy to go to their houses for coffee or an evening of talk, that I felt comfortable with them and empathic toward the tribulations and pleasures of their lives. Together we had found a level where we got on very well, could carry on conversations, share jokes, enjoy each other’s company. Today I think of three or four of those women as my friends, maintaining a distinction between acquaintances and friends, and I believe if asked, they would say the same of me. But I don’t see any of them every day; sometimes I don’t see them for weeks, or even months. One of my first lessons about the nature of friendship in the country is that the deepest friendships take years—even a lifetime to build—that there is no sense of urgency about it, as it seemed to me there is in the city, where it seemed essential to speak with close friends three or four times a week and to do things together at least once a week, if not more often, month after month, year after year, where any great hiatus in companionship meant the friendship was largely over.

I was beginning to see that one profound effect of viewing the world always from the same vantage point is to endow one with a sense of timelessness; that is, with a sense of there being time for everything, and also of a sense of the rhythmic nature of time: the cycle of the seasons, of the sun and the moon, which spills over also into the understanding of human life as cyclical. One is born, goes through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, maturity, old age. One dies at the same time as others are born, and so on. And this steady cycle of human life is very clear and immediate in rural life where people attending a neighbor’s wedding might remember helping get the bride’s mother to the hospital the day the bride was born, and at a
funeral might remember an illness of the deceased fifty years before, and how it was similar to an ailment of his grandfather’s.

Urban life confuses this elemental knowledge, disturbs it in many ways, for example, by separating children from adults in most social situations, and retired people from working people, and by allowing the culture of the teenager—which is not to say that this latter doesn’t happen in the country, too, but out here children are raised as workers in the family enterprise, and as a result of this, boys gain a sense of manhood and girls of womanhood very early, so that teenagerhood is neither so pronounced nor so different. All of this, it seems to me, nourishes in one a firm and very basic sense of stability and security—sad to say, now being disturbed by the agricultural crisis—and a sense that everything will come round again in due course without there being any need to push it.

But, oh, I longed to talk! I yearned with a desire that was close to heartbreak to sit down close to a good woman friend and say to her in an undertone, “It’s like this, you see? And this and this and this. I feel—it seems to me—I can’t make sense of—” And I imagined her sobriety, the depth in her eyes as she listened, the serious, gentle warmth as she replied. How good I would feel after, with how much more strength I would be able to face my new life.

Sometimes when I asked questions of one of the women I was meeting, I felt a misunderstanding between myself and her. I could see in her face and the way she moved her hands that she was defensive about her life, thinking I was scornful or that I knew things I didn’t know or wanted to know things that were apparently common knowledge in the community, but about which I hadn’t even an inkling at the time, and if I had I would never have dreamt of asking about. I wanted to know what I had asked, that was all; my new acquaintances did not understand the depth of my ignorance,
nor the depth of my longing to
feel
how their lives were, so that I might find a way to belong.

Now when I ran into the inevitable small cruelties of society, they hurt me out of all proportion to their significance, because here I was powerless, had no one to turn to—for what did Peter know of women’s ways?—and I was without family or friends to defend me. With a touch of paranoia, I began to feel that people were trying to cut me down to size, to abrade me into the same shape and form that they had themselves. Filled with frustration and anger I wrote in my journal:
They try to make you forget who you are.

One day in the second year of our marriage, it occurred to me that I might write a novel. The notion simply popped into my head and I immediately dismissed it as a ridiculous idea, not to mention embarrassingly clichéd. But I kept thinking about it, and finally, telling myself that if it turned out I couldn’t do it nobody needed to know, that nobody needed ever to see one word I wrote, in great excitement, I actually began a novel.

It was set in the city and its protagonist was a woman, a single parent, a person with a career and all those urban concerns that had until so recently been mine. Even while I was working on it I knew my subject matter had already been done to death by a thousand published writers. But, failing to consider the possibilities with any seriousness, I thought I had nothing else to write about.

As I wrote I began to realize that even though I had read more novels than I could count, I had never paid any attention to how writers put novels together, and I discovered that a novelist couldn’t possibly tell the whole story, that the reader filled in many gaps in some way I wasn’t sure of, but thought had to be given clues by the writer. But I wasn’t sure what those clues might be, and I wasn’t
sure that what I had written so far had given the clues which would lend the work a coherent narrative flow. I began to feel confused and uncertain about what to do next, and before long, in some perplexity, I had given up.

Somewhere I think I still have those fifty or so pages. When I lost the thread of that novel, the exhilaration of it, I thought of short stories. Surely, I thought to myself, it must be easier to write short stories. I mentioned my interest to somebody on the district Community College Committee, and next thing I knew I was driving into Eastend to attend an evening class on the writing of short stories. Our doctor at that time was British and his wife, our teacher, was an Oxford graduate with a degree in English Literature, a brilliant woman with a bottomless fund of knowledge, and as I later discovered, a talented writer herself. That short-lived class—four or five evenings, I think—launched me as a writer.

Well, it wasn’t easier to write short stories. Yet, all the while I struggled with them, writing and revising and writing them again and again, I held in my mind the novel I would one day write.

I was by then thirty-eight years old and I had finally discovered that I had wanted to be a writer since I was nine years old and had indeed written a novel. This was a childhood memory I’d suppressed, or simply forgotten, which came back to me while I was attending that night class. It is probably more accurate to say only that as a child I had tried to write a book, that I had been so excited by the idea when I thought of it that the wonderful feeling it produced inside me was akin to the day—the year before when I’d made my First Communion—when a cloud came down and lit inside my chest. I didn’t then conceive of the notion of being a writer; I don’t believe I’d ever conceived before even of the notion that somebody had written the books I borrowed from the library and that we used in school—certainly no teacher had ever pointed this out.

My mother, who was an almost obsessive reader and who insisted my sisters and I read all the great books of her own childhood, from the Oz series to the L.M. Montgomery books to Dickens, had probably mentioned authors in passing, but I doubt directly connecting them to the words on the page, and I had failed to make the connection myself. In this milieu, my idea of writing a book myself had to have been a purely creative act, and the wonderful feeling the idea elicited, in retrospect, an object lesson, both for how my life should have been guided from that time on and for the value of encouraging all children in creative acts.