The Rural Life (24 page)

F
or some reason, every stage in this advancing season has brought with it a feeling of incredulity. A few weeks ago it seemed
unbelievable that the leaves should be turning so soon and then that they should have dropped so promptly. Now, just this
week, it seems incredible that snow should have fallen out of a goose-gray sky, skidding eastward toward the missing sun.
I wake up thinking, “November already,” and realize that “already” is a word that’s been with me all autumn long, always measuring
how far behind the season I feel.

The weather has been anything but harsh. Even the few frosts so far have been less than militant. But I seem to be holding
back, feeling a reluctance about winter I’ve never felt before. Usually there’s something purely pragmatic about that feeling,
a long list of jobs that still need doing, most of them the kind whose only satisfaction is knowing they’re done. Nearly everyone
who lives in the country feels crowded for time right now. “Racing daylight” is the phrase I hear, and I hear it from men
and women who’ve been racing daylight, working outdoors this time of year, their whole lives. There’s something different
in the way they say it now. You hear hesitation from the most unhesitant people.

It takes no imagination to stay synchronized with the shifting of the season, with the retracting daylight or the sudden gathering
of a wet morning wind that gets behind your ears and under your hair when you feed the animals. You don’t really even have
to pay attention to keep up with the calendar. But you do have to be ready to part with the days that have already passed.
September took far more than a month this year. It probably took two months, the one our bodies lived and the wholly different
month we lived in our minds. Time fell out of gear for almost everyone.

Some of the reluctance that comes with this autumn is mere uncertainty, a sense that no one really knows the score. Going
into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it’s nothing more than confidence in one’s own preparations.
Somehow that’s not good enough this year. Like everyone, I find myself wanting the world to be right with itself again, even
if only in the wrong old ways. In the heart of the reluctance I feel and hear in the voices of my neighbors, there’s a longing
for the inconsequential summer we were having not so many weeks ago. Longing is probably too strong a word. Better to say
that the memory of what was, for many Americans, an uneventful August exerts a certain attraction right now. But the present
is irrefutable. The leaves won’t rise again, except on a cold wind. Before long, I hope, that won’t seem so regrettable.

T
he last of the World War I veterans are almost impossibly old by now. They flicker past in the war footage shown repeatedly
on late-night television, young men burdened by the weight of arms, with everything that implies. Now nearly all those men
are dead, and the few still living seem to symbolize the enormous changes that have swept across the world in the years since
the armistice was signed in 1918. In the presence of men and women of advanced age, it’s always tempting to behave like the
host of the postmodern world, welcoming them to life as we know it, inviting them to marvel at the place we’ve all wound up,
bristling as it does with the latest technology. The roles should be reversed. The old ones should be hosting us, inviting
us to contemplate with them the intractable knowledge that comes from a place like the battlefields of World War I, where
every faith—and especially the faith in moral and technical advancement—seemed to totter.

The armistice was signed in November, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. On its own, November can
be bleak enough. The leaves are gone, and the trees seem frayed. A ridgeline of blackened, upthrust boughs seems to mirror
the rain. The clouds have the texture of steel wool. Winter could come the next minute or the next month. But what November
has ever been like November in the embattled salients of the Great War, where the earth itself was dismembered and interred,
its flesh confused with the flesh of soldiers, horses, and mules? Even at peace, nature seems disordered, almost skeletal,
in November. The consolation lies in the wood-smoke spiraling out of chimneys, the light in windows as the day goes down.
It lies in the unbroken rhythm of living at peace, where the hour of armistice—the end of that painful caesura—is almost forgotten.

L
indy and I moved into this house on November 13, a day, that first year, with thirteen hours of freezing rain. In the years
since, a part of me has been grafted onto this place, and I’m still waiting to learn whether it’s a vital part or not. I promised
when we bought this house—Lindy recalls this clearly—to take things slowly, to bring about changes at a leisurely pace. I
thought of that promise recently as I stood atop a stepladder in the kitchen, whacking the fireplace with a sledgehammer while
Lindy tried to catch the dust before it landed. Our property abounds in firewood, and it had occurred to us that a freestanding
wood-stove would be more practical than the largely useless fireplace taking up a corner of the kitchen. We opened a wall
in a mildly interrogative manner. Once we did, we could see that the fireplace was just a sheet-metal firebox set behind a
cheap façade of cement-board, mortar, and unattractive stone of a kind you might use to make mountains in a model railroad.

It all came down one Saturday morning, opening up what had been a narrow doorway between the kitchen and dining room and revealing
a beautiful old beam. An old-house owner is a prospector, staking his claim on worn linoleum, tattered wallpaper, or painted
wallboard. The hope is that beneath them lies an undefiled treasure of architectural detail or sumptuous wood, which a previous
generation of owners—sick of looking at refined carpentry and the grain of chestnut or oak—covered with horrors all their
own. The hope is often satisfied, but not often unambiguously. The beam we revealed is hand-hewn and completely sound except
for the last foot on its eastern end. That will take some fudging. As we poke at this building, we discover in its bones the
effects of lifelong bad posture, occasional inadequacies in the diet, and the signs of one or two serious accidents that would
have killed a lesser domicile.

By now I find myself living in a house that barely resembles the one I thought we were buying. The house has changed us more
than we’ve changed it. I almost never smack my head on the low ceiling over the stairs to the mudroom anymore. For me that
passage has grown taller over the past year. Visitors smack their heads again and again, no matter how often I warn them,
which confirms that the ceiling is just where it was when we moved in. And though Lindy and I have begun to wear a comforting
groove into this place, much like the one the horses have worn through the barnyard, our daydreams grow more and more elaborate.
Every day we’re surrounded by the adaptations other people have made to what was once, long ago, a simple rectangular structure,
scarcely more than a wood-frame cabin on a hillside. Two centuries of change are telescoped into our day-to-day experience.

In nearly every way, it would be easier to alter a new house to our needs. But there’s something static about a new house,
something terminal. This old house invites adaptation because it embodies a history of adaptation. A new house just stands
there, settling, waiting for someone to come along and wonder what’s under those walls or why two bedrooms can’t be merged
into one.

So this is where time has led us. The kitchen deck must go. It slopes toward the house and gets about ten minutes of sunlight
on midwinter afternoons. In late November a glacier begins to build in that dark, antarctic corner, and it only ceases calving
icebergs into the azalea bed about the end of April. To replace the deck—someday—we have in mind a stone terrace sheltered
by a pergola, a pergola knotted with climbing hydrangea or a hops plant or, since we’re daydreaming, ceanothus. Lindy’s workroom—a
small, crazed addition—must go as well. Its foundation is cracked, and its eaves actually cut across the lower corners of
two windows upstairs.

Besides the days when we fret about our plans for this house, there are also days that approach perfection, when things seem
fine just as they are. This was an autumn full of those days, the kind that lull you into believing that winter will never
come, or that when it does come it will bring only snowfall or blue skies, not thirteen hours of freezing rain. The sugar
maples turned, and the goldenrod blazed all around us. I poked around at the base of a compost heap I started in April and
found that time had turned a pile of horse manure, waste straw, weeds, and grass clippings into friable compost. I took a
cart of it up to the asparagus bed and mulched it heavily. I buried the feet of all the roses in fresh manure and cut down
the peonies. Then I walked to the high end of the pasture, above the maples, and looked back at the house, itself almost the
color of goldenrod. I imagined that I could see smoke from the new woodstove, which still lay crated in the barn, drifting
out of the chimney and beyond it the first flakes of snow against the distant hills.

A
ldo Leopold’s ecological testament,
A Sand County Almanac,
was a posthumous book, appearing a year and a half after Leopold died of a heart attack in April 1948 at the age of sixty-one.
A graduate of the Yale Forestry School and a seventeen-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold had his greatest influence,
during his lifetime, as a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin. But it’s the
Almanac,
his meditations on a Wisconsin River farm and an unequivocal statement of conscience, that will carry his influence and his
good name down the generations.

Leopold’s extraordinary contribution to our world was to articulate the idea of a land ethic. The human relation to land,
he wrote, “is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” Leopold believed that the basis of successful
conservation was to extend to nature the ethical sense of responsibility that humans extend to each other. This idea has acquired
tremendous force since
A Sand County Almanac
first appeared. The fact that the idea now seems unexceptionable is a measure of its widespread influence.