The Rural Life (14 page)

A
couple of years ago, judging by roadside signs, it looked as though the rural economy of America depended almost entirely
on the sale and resale of Beanie Babies. On every country road you passed hand-lettered squares of cardboard, nailed to a
fence or tied to a mailbox, announcing the availability of Beanie Babies. If you didn’t know what Beanie Babies were, the
signs could be confusing—
LAMBS FOR SALE
at one farmstead,
PIGLETS
at another down the road, and
BEANIE BABIES
at a third. As I drove home from the train station the other night over an hour of country roads, I realized I hadn’t seen
a
BEANIE BABIES
sign in a long time. That sector of the rural economy has moved to the Internet.

But the roadside is still a public market. Never mind the farm stands, which are now coming into their midsummer glory. What
I mean is the person who builds utility trailers, one by one, in the garage in his spare time and then parks them beside the
road with a
FOR SALE
sign on the hitch. Or the kids who run a summer business selling small bags of
CAMP WOOD
by the side of the road for about $1,000 a cord. Nearly every farm has a lot, usually behind a machine shed, full of old
implements half-buried in tall grass. Some of them are genuine antiques, some are too good to be given up, and some are junk.
But every now and then there is one that is just the right vintage—a 1980s feed wagon, say—to be stationed out near the ditch.
You don’t even have to see the
FOR SALE
sign to know the wagon is for sale. Something about its position says it all. The wagon isn’t really talking to the weekenders
heading upcountry. It’s talking to the farmers who drive by it every day, for whom the blacktop highway is still a local farm
road.

There’s a gesture in those roadside offers—the short red school bus, the $1,100 pickup—that I can’t help admiring. At first
they look like pure dismissal, a way of unloading disused pieces of equipment or making a little extra money on stuff that
was just lying around anyway. But they’re really invitations. They show a confidence in the passerby and in time. Someone
will park on the shoulder and take a slow walk around that feed wagon, perhaps even crawl underneath it to check the running
gear. Maybe not soon. But when it happens, the doorbell will ring or the dogs will bark. A stranger will present himself,
someone from farther up the road, across the ridge, down the valley. The price was firm once, back when the wagon was new,
a price anyone could understand. But now the wagon belongs to a different economy, which is as much a matter of tact and understanding
as it is dollars and cents. It’s a matter of knowing what things that have lost or long outlived their prices are really worth,
stranger to stranger, neighbor to neighbor.

T
he sign of full summer is a child’s bicycle—the kind with a pink frame, white tires, and a white wicker basket on the handlebars—strapped
to the rear end of a minivan. The van, with out-of-state plates, is parked at a pullout at Bryce Canyon National Park, in
southern Utah. With his free hand a father is trying to wave his family closer to a wooden sign that marks the altitude. On
the sign a raven sits, wise to the ways of tourists. The man’s other hand holds a video camera.

For a few seconds the family smiles together into the lens. Behind them, beyond the hoodoos and the bristlecone pines, lies
an unintelligible vastness. The family packs back into the car and drives on, to the next pullout, the next vista, the next
motel or campground. The raven blinks.

This is the traveling time of year, vacation time. The campgrounds are full at all the national parks. At the major interchanges
on the major transcontinental routes, the motels fill up by midafternoon. A brisk trade is being done all across the nation
in plastic tomahawks and beaded coin purses, in cheeseburgers and Sno-Kones, in postcards and shrink-wrapped firewood. At
the truck stops there’s a sudden perplexing infusion of white-legged people who pull up to the wrong pumps and wander uninvited
into the truckers’ lounge. At every mountain pass a subdivision of white recreational vehicles inches its way uphill, vehicles
with names like Conquest, Chieftain, and Eagle, but with satellite dishes and microwaves too.

All in all, this looks less like the quest for difference than the diffusion of sameness. Travel gets easier all the time,
and it gets harder every year to distance yourself from the web of familiarity that’s been thrown over the approaches to scenic
America—the web of ATMs, chain restaurants, chain motels, and chain experiences. Beneath the convenience of it all lurks a
hidden fear of disappointment and strangeness, of feeling displaced, of coming to the limits of a known world.

The scenery itself has been changed by so much familiarity. A vista is no longer the point of departure for an experience,
the view from the trailhead, so to speak. It has become the experience. Long ago, America set out to democratize the sublime,
to provide motorized access to the great natural vistas across the country. The effect has been to downsize the sublime, if
only because there’s no longer a sense of approach, of discovery. The trail is too well marked with souvenir shops and soft
ice cream.

I
n a stand of trees—an acre of downed timber and blackened trunks—a three-year-old elk grazed, the velvet on his antlers still
plush and unrubbed. His paunch sagged with the weight of constant feeding, and on his back sat a cowbird, heedless. The sun
was still a half-hour above a knoll to the west, and in the evening light the seedheads of the grasses across the river, where
the elk stood, looked ponderous, dense and purple. The river was the Gibbon, where it bends far away from the highway in a
section of Yellowstone called Elk Park.

I had come to fish, and I sat with two good friends, in waders, feet dangling in the river. The fishing, highly speculative,
would wait until the sun fell below the treeline and a mayfly called the brown drake appeared, if it appeared at all. Where
we sat, the Gibbon flowed from west to east. Its surface, full of conflicting currents, was as bright as the fading sun. Weed
beds covered the bottom, and water lilies edged the far bank. Every now and then a lily pad would turn on its side and knife
downward through the water in a motion like the arc a trout makes when it rises and falls through the surface, feeding. One
of us would hold a hand up to the sun and watch caddis flies drifting, like the cotton from cottonwoods, across the back-lit
meadow, across the dark timber to the west. The elk lay down in the tall grass at the river’s edge, ruminating.

After a few visits to Yellowstone you get used to the happenstance of seeing wildlife. One year the thermal meadows near the
Firehole are full of bison. The next year at the same time, the flies have already driven them to higher ground. The highway
through Yellowstone, to which most visitors cling, comes to seem like a lottery of sorts, a path through a set of loose probabilities—weather,
season, time of day, and so on—that determine whether you’ll come across a moose or a coyote or any of the other creatures
whose habitations seem, to humans, entirely unfixed. To the movements of animals in Yellowstone, we naturally impute a narrow
determinism—they’re driven by hunger, irritation, danger, courtship. But to what do the elk in Elk Park impute our love of
asphalt?

For a while, when darkness began to settle, it looked as though the brown drakes wouldn’t appear. A few caddis began laying
eggs on the water, slowly working their way upstream. Brown drakes are very big mayflies. They don’t stroll out of the woods,
like elk, or pick their way silently across a meadow, the way mouse-hunting coyotes do. They adhere to the corridor of the
river as tightly as tourists adhere to pavement. They simply appear when the light is low and the air and water temperature
are right.

One second the brown drakes were not there—and then there they were, fluttering up and down at head height above the Gibbon,
appearing in twos and threes and then in dozens, knotting and unknotting as they mated. We were ready, waiting only for the
flies to settle onto the water and cause the big brown trout living in the Gibbon to feed. The brown drakes rose and fell,
rose and fell, always a little nearer to the river’s surface. We looked on with a certain tension, trying at once to watch
the mayflies and all of the visible river, as though it were an unmoving plane of light. Then the mayflies vanished—who knew
where or why?—and the Gibbon began to flow again. We walked to the highway, where a cow elk wearing a radio collar grazed
in the abrupt glow of flashbulbs.

T
hroughout history, the moon has been a byword for mutability, its inconstancy an emblem of the inconstancy of human affairs.
One night it rises dark, a new moon. One night a sliver of it hangs in the western sky, nearly catching Venus within its horns.
One night it lies distended on the eastern horizon, not a sphere but a flattened disk slipping out of Earth’s shadow. On no
two consecutive nights has it ever risen at the same time or in the same shape. Even now, thirty years after humans first
set foot on the moon, it still seems natural to attribute these qualities to the orb itself and not to the perspective we
view it from.

Those who were alive then, a generation ago, will remember many things about that night, July 20, 1969. The moon was a waxing
crescent that just suggested the contours of its dark limb. Where skies were clear and dark, people walked outdoors and gazed
at the moon, then walked back inside and looked at the scratchy black-and-white TV transmission from the landing site on the
Sea of Tranquillity, then walked back outside again. Of all the imaginative leaps that occurred during the preparations for
Apollo 11,
and during the Mercury and Gemini projects, none were as difficult, because none were as abrupt, as the imaginative leap
that ordinary people faced when confronted with the fact of a moon landing. And who is to say which part of that leap was
harder? Realizing that two men really stood at that moment upon the moon? Recognizing the technical virtuosity and determination
that had made it possible? Or understanding, for one unsettling instant, that we too, like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,
stood upon a sphere hurtling through the darkness of space?

If people groped to understand what it all meant while it was actually happening, we’re still groping thirty years later.
The iconic simplicity of that moment—Neil Armstrong’s leap onto the moon’s surface—has obscured the technical complexity,
the sheer engineering will, that lay behind it. The photograph of the first American flag on the moon’s surface, standing
stiffly against the void of deep space, no longer suggests to us, as it did to some at the time, that America in 1969 was
a nation at war with Vietnam and with itself. Looking back, I find myself wondering how it was possible to send a man from
the turbulent America of the 1960s all the way to the Sea of Tranquillity.

What’s most surprising about the events of that night long ago is that they’re more surprising now than they were then. The
breathlessness of the moment itself has subsided into mere fact. But in its place, an inescapable question has emerged. Who
were we then that such a thing was possible?