Horsekeeping Read online

  How would I adapt to my new role of farmer? Certainly I wouldn’t be milking cows in the wee hours like Mr. Duprey or dragging a plow across the fields, but I would be more than a casual weekend onlooker. Could I grow a thick skin, look death in the face every day, treat animals as commodities and not as kin? What category is horse? From what new angle of vision would I reconnect to the land as food rather than ornamental backyard? Would I sink in deeper, tilting the urban/rural balance even more in favor of the country? Could I continue to regularly flip the rural/urban switch, a debate I already had each Sunday night when I’d rather be curled up with a book in Salisbury as the sun dips down, rather than crowded for two-plus hours in a child- and animal-filled Suburban hurtling our way down the perilous Saw Mill Parkway back toward the concrete jungle? Back to school and homework; the bleating Blackberry of Wall Street work; the elbow-jostling crowds racing along the sidewalks to beat the traffic lights; the pedestrian and driver rage; the economic competition and social one-upsmanship; the stressed-out people on foot, in subways, buses and cars; the exhaust fumes; the noise, noise, noise, NOISE; the effort required to squeeze in a museum, a play or a dinner at a nice restaurant on occasion in order not to waste living amidst such a brilliant offering of culture and cuisine; the time tension that makes Scott and I unnecessarily cross with one another.

  The country supposedly offers respite, the weekday world at bay. Riding up Fridays unfailingly relaxes and excites, the start of our time in the place we prefer, rather than its end. Once we hit the Red Rooster in Brewster for non-processed chicken tenders, perfectly unhealthy fries and ice-cream heavy milkshakes that require strenuous sucking, we breathe easier into the second half of the journey. We greedily track the interim five days’ worth of change that occurred in our absence. In the spring we race the darkness to see the latest blooms, especially that one profuse daffodil field along the roadside hill in Amenia. “Isn’t it beautiful?” we sigh every time. We watch for the annual migration of frogs and salamanders that first rainy, forty-five-degree Fahrenheit night in April, arguing about Scott’s speed—“You hit one,” “No, I didn’t, that was a leaf ”—and roll down our windows to get the full effect of the peepers’ cacophonous mating chirps in the wetlands at the foot of our road. “Do they make you feel like a horny old toad, dear?” I’d tease, and he’d “peep” back at me with a guttural mating croak of his own.

  The autumn is not outdone by spring’s prizes. We keep tabs on our favorite flashy trees, comparing their color to years past and debate what makes a vibrant foliage year, the experts’ theories different every year and no closer to reliability—dry year or wet, cold snap or a slow cool? The blustery wind that whooshes us, still dressed in our city duds, through our front door into sheltered warmth, the welcoming waft of the extinguished fireplaces reminding us their useful time is near. In the winter we watch the temperature gage drop as we head north, a degree variance of twenty or more that our family bets on at various landmarks—“I say eighteen at the top of Smith Hill” Elliot guesses, but Jane goes for seventeen and wins. I especially like the black, dark nights when it is impossible to see without high beams that search mile after mile for a quick-darting opossum or swooping owl. Or, those deep hours of low, fat moons that wake me and through the skylights cast my large shadow as I tiptoe, shivering out from under the down comforter and across the cold tile floor where I gratefully reach the rug only to face the freezing toilet seat. Returning to my bright-as-day bedroom, I find Scott also awake and ready to snuggle me into his heat. “How do your feet get so cold so fast?” he asks.

  But the ride back on Sunday is a push against the tide of the dream into the wakefulness of work, school, city stresses.

  “Do you think we could live in Salisbury full-time and be happy?” I sullenly asked Scott as we flowed from route 22’s two lanes onto 684’s six.

  “I think so, but timing is everything. We’re too young, and we still like New York. At least I still do.” He arched his eyebrows at me. “Most people who make the switch have tired of the city, or at least its expense.”

  “I still like the city, too. But it’s so beautiful here, and I never really want to leave, while I always look forward to coming up here Friday nights. We sleep so well in our Salisbury bed and are often ornery during the week.”

  “Yes, but that is because we work and deal with school in New York, while all we do in Salisbury is play. If we lived only here, it’d be different.”

  I sighed: it was true. I didn’t want to stale our Salisbury life, its fresh snap perpetually newly born of its part-time status. Yet we “play” to a fault squeezing a full life into each forty-eight hours so that we go south exhausted and often grumpy. Our Connecticut weekend life slowly became even fuller than our NYC one, disabling it as a retreat to regroup like most weekenders. Friday nights we hustle our clan and belongings into the car, charge the traffic, stop for kid food, arrive, unload, tuck the kids in bed and hurry to our dinner-date at The White Hart before the kitchen closes at nine-thirty. Then an hour or so unpacking the two LL Bean bags of stuff we can’t seem to avoid even after eighteen years of buying two of absolutely everything, going through the mail, listening to the phone messages and reading the local papers. We are usually up around 6:00 a.m. Saturday, out by 7:00 for an early walk before breakfast, and rush around to farm visits, tennis and basketball time with the kids and bike rides with and without them, the kids’ singing lessons, church, time on the swing, backyard baseball, swimming at the town lake, boating on the other lake, our Saturday night date of a movie and dinner, planting the veggie garden, skiing trips to Butternut a half hour north, hikes with friends, cocktail parties and charity events, weeding the veggie garden, and, and, and!

  It’s a crazy pace we know we shouldn’t sustain, and the constant busyness frazzles our marital relationship on occasion—days of the silent treatment, a frosty co-existence requiring energy we don’t have to thaw. We pledge to slow down but balk at giving anything up. And summers pose another challenge. With Scott working in the city weekdays and the rest of us living it up in Salisbury, the weekends are fraught with him refitting into our new routine; we’re still busy, I’m tired of dealing with the kids single-handedly, and he is understandably resentful that it’s not always a forty-eight hour Kodak moment. Lacking day-to-day face time, we spend ten weeks vaguely out of sync with one another. This new farm could only add to our time pressure: one more thing to create, fit in, take care of and, supposedly, enjoy. Scott handles the shifts better than me and is more refreshed by the weekends than drained. But when I am really shattered on Sunday nights, my solution is “Don’t you think it’s time to move?”

  “You poor mutt,” Scott refrained his favorite line from John Updike’s Rabbit series. I have always hoped irony makes it a term of endearment as opposed to Harry Angstrom’s contemptuous pity for the wife with the gritty bottom he no longer loved. “You really can’t take it, can you?”

  I wasn’t provoked. “Do you think the schools in Connecticut are as good as they say they are?”

  “It’s hard to know,” Scott shrugged. “The kids would probably get a fine education almost anywhere because they like to learn. But I wonder if Salisbury would lose its luster when no longer paired with New York urban life. Maybe we’d take its beauty for granted.”

  “The winters are long in New England” I conceded. And those muddy months of pre-spring—you know, all of March, April, and even sometimes May. Museums, plays and movies certainly help when we’re in the deep freeze.”

  “Anyway, I still like my work and don’t want to quit yet. Plus, if we’re getting into farming we’ll need the money.”

  “But can’t you imagine long walks every day, time to do all we like to do and to sit and relax? Maybe even sex in the middle of the day?” He looked at me like yeah, right. “Would we get sick of each other?”

  “No. We’d fill our time just the same, and be just as busy. We’re not happy doing nothing.”

  “I wo
nder if we’d go feral. Some people I see around here don’t seem so well-groomed, kind of like the great unwashed. Maybe without the city competition to look good, you just give up.”

  Would I still bother with make-up, I wondered? A slave to eyelash curlers and mascara since the age of fifteen, my country weekend routine had pushed morning showers and full facial attention to the evening, if then. Maybe one cold winter day just slides into the rest, the house too drafty to bare skin, nothing to dress up for. Truly practical clothes are not fashionable, and in the lashing cold everyone looks grey and parched, their skin tissue-paper crinkled. Under flannel, puffy coats and hair-crushing hats, who’d notice any effort?

  “Maybe we should stick it out a little longer, keep Salisbury that special treat,” I persuaded myself as I thought of the times I debated wearing my still warm PJs under a long coat to my son’s pre-dawn hockey practices.

  “Yes, let’s. At least for now,” Scott concluded as we turned onto Lexington Ave toward “home.”

  THOUGH I STILL TALKED of trading the city for the country, I remained wary based on my study of English and American literature undertaken while Scott and I lived in London from 1990–1995. Writers have been accused of killing the notion of the American Pastoral since literature began; weekenders can be accused of the same land grab in trying to have it all. I thought back to my work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton who cast aside Boston and New York City for rural life in the Berkshires, just a stone’s throw from Salisbury. They showed me the lay of the land: the dream and the reality of both exterior and interior landscapes. They conditioned my expectations of all things rural.

  I identified with each of these writers in different ways, and taken all together they gave me depth of field. Hawthorne, a parent like myself, showed me country wonders through children’s eyes in his diary of a few summer weeks alone with his son Julian in Stockbridge. In Pittsfield, Melville, a “gentleman” farmer like me, pointed out the beautiful industry of stone walls, the pleasures of a crackling country hearth, and the serenity of a cow simply moving her jaws around a cut-up pumpkin. Wharton, a domestically inclined person like me, unapologetically celebrated the deep satisfaction of staking a home in Lenox: planting a garden, setting up house, taking friends, dogs and horses for upland adventures. Our shared experience of locality highlighted the woods, the hills, the pastures, the stone walls, the industry, the artistry, and the echoes of old in rural New England life that I had newly encountered there.

  Their past still informs my present. I associate the history of place and people with myself and the land now under my feet. These artists depicted themselves puzzling over their landscape and culture. Reading their Berkshire-based fiction and biographies I delved through past layers of my environment, and added my own pictures, words, memories. In Hawthorne, Melville and Wharton’s metaphors, scenes and stories, I recognized what I saw around me and intuited what was gone, a more informed engagement than I could have managed through my own surface vision.

  Though all three authors at times gushed over the beauty of the place in their letters and fiction, they ultimately zeroed in on the darker side of country life. Hawthorne’s Faustian character Ethan Brand turned fiendish when he looked too directly into the fiery lime kilns, the author’s pointed warning against the annihilation of the heart by an over-intellectualized head, all in the midst of a “pastoral” environment. He questioned mechanization and progress—the new factories producing iron, paper and textiles popping up alongside rushing rivers and remote hillsides that would denude the entire region of ninety percent of its trees. Do we sin against nature? Can nature protect us from ourselves? Are we, like Brand, driven by forces beyond our control? Is evil a choice?

  Melville also worked these themes into his short story “Tartarus of Maids,” “inspired,” or at least enhanced by his visit by horse-drawn sleigh to a Berkshire paper factory to purchase writing stock. Blank faced factory girls produce blank paper, and the monotony of assembly line mechanization is roundly criticized. This all suited my curmudgeonly fear of suburbanization and sprawl, dismal by-products of our nation’s industrial past and current wealth. Fortunately for western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut, the smoky industrialization of the nineteenth century blew out before it irreparably ruined the land, but poverty and depopulation followed in its wake and contemporary menaces newly threaten. McMansions pave over farmland, metal barns replace old wooden beauties, chain stores and strip malls render Main Streets obsolete, and I often despair.

  Melville and Hawthorne understood that the country life was not a hideout from the “real” world. Both Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand and Melville’s Pierre characters were country boys afforded little protection by their rural upbringing. Life and choices drove them from their childhood pastoral into suicide. And neither author remained in his New England country idyll—they both returned to “civilization,” Hawthorne back to Concord within twenty months, and Melville back to the docks of New York City after thirteen years.

  Wharton high-tailed the country life too, though it long continued to define her alter ego. Despite her society upbringing and the intellectual company she preferred, she doggedly protested she was happiest in the country and should have remained the country hermit. Yet, skittish of country isolation after ten half-years in Lenox, she moved to France, never returning to the place she prized. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she wrote: “The Mount was my first real home, and though it is nearly twenty years since I last saw it (for I was too happy there to ever want to revisit it as a stranger) its blessed influence still lives in me.” Should I believe her words or her actions? Despite her personal country experience, her fiction portrayed silently suffering characters trapped in hidden rural poverty. Though heavily criticized by her Berkshire neighbors, her novella Ethan Frome remains one of her masterpieces. Its less well-known sister story Summer is similarly bleak.

  I wonder whether these authors’ fictional creations persuaded them to leave. Full-time country status ultimately didn’t work for these rural sojourners, and I do not want to go similarly sour on Salisbury. Maybe truth lies in the old adage “too much of a good thing.” The slide into country life can defeat as well as inspire, though for most of us the experience encompasses a middle ground between awe and terror. I have felt the petrifying aloneness of a late autumn sun dropping below the edge of a vast and impersonal forested hillside; a few minutes of such existential angst can last a lifetime, rich or poor, writer or plumber. And, any romantic version of nature was quickly dashed once I got lost in the woods; its seemingly benevolent face turned a sinister cheek. I both yearn for my country idyll and fear its isolation. Maybe it is best I stick with what I’ve got and continue to fantasize about an alternate life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Animal Kingdom

  MY NOTIONS OF COUNTRY LIFE sprouted from shallow roots in American suburban soil. In childhood I followed a well-trod path through fairy tales and backyard, woodsy adventures only to depart nature and the imagination to study Economics at college and work ten years in the retailing business. In my thirties, I returned to a more formalized study of nature as part of my British-based nineteenth-century literature degree and emerged the other side of Romanticism fully versed in its pastoral tradition of the country as the seat of innocence and adventure. To dim the stars in my eyes, postgraduate study taught me to be wary of an anthropomorphic approach to nature and that transporting nature encounters are often slippery. They happen surreptitiously, almost by osmosis, or as Hawthorne described, when you are lucky enough to catch nature unawares, obliquely from the corner of your eye. If you resort to force, or, if you’ll excuse the feminized metaphor, try to grab her by the throat and shake the life out of her, you will be sorely disappointed. Any deep appreciation of country life is an acquired skill hard-won by knowing a place well, penetrating beyond the desired spectaculars to more unexpected subtle surprises. Not every encounter is lovely, not every pleasure void of
pain.

  But once back in Salisbury I only half-expected reality to adjust my “rose-color spectacled view,” to borrow Wharton’s borrowed phrase. I still held my youthful visions and had to earn a more mature knowledge, not through books, but up close and personal. And New England nature did prove elusive to my suburban-untrained body and mind, requiring patience and time—not something that this instant gratification-addicted American was good at. At first, Salisbury did and did not live up to my high expectations. Sure, it was picture-beautiful upon my first visits—the greens, the blues. But once we settled in, nature’s revelations proved minor and occasional.

  An eager beaver that first year in 1989, I awaited a grand flotilla of natural beauty, song and especially wildlife: that perfect idyll, that serene arcadia. I sat back to enjoy the parade. But I made a poor witness, my sensory awareness dulled by the animated Disney and TV of my youth in nature-parched northern New Jersey topped off by fourteen years pounding the pavements of Philadelphia and New York City. Simple contrast was not enough to yield true appreciation. After the first blush of amazement had passed, I tried to deny my disappointment. I looked so hard and saw very little from my imagined preview.

  There were exciting moments, like a bobcat on the deck of our first house, stealthy, short-tailed and catlike, but wild. Or the fawn that slept against the hillside in our yard for the entire day, until, out of fear for its health, I approached it with a carrot. Of course it upped and fled, rendering me naïve and ridiculous. Apparently, does often park their newborns in a “safe” environment while they graze nearby if not exactly within sight. This mama did not anticipate do-gooder urbanites wielding orange sticks at their progeny. Stubbornly childlike, I still worked at my adventures to take things up a notch.