The Rural Life (28 page)

I
wake up sometimes at night, two or three o’clock, and walk to a window that looks out over the pasture. Some nights the moon
is high in its December arc, so different from the angle it cuts through the sky in summer. Its light falls like a pale shadow
among the white birches on the hillside. But on nights when the sky is hidden by clouds, when I can almost feel my pupils
dilating in the search for a reference point outdoors, I turn to a flat panel of light that shines out along the fence line.
It comes from a bulb in the chicken house that clicks on automatically at one-thirty in the morning. Dawn comes abruptly to
the chickens. I imagine them blinking at reveille on their roosts.

The light is a trick, a way of fooling the hens into thinking that summer lingers on and that laying time is still here. Our
hens are young. Until December 22 they had never laid an egg. But on the day after the winter solstice, in time with the returning
sun, we found a brown pullet egg, still warm, in the hay below the nest boxes. It was an occasion of great mutual satisfaction.
The roosters, still far too numerous and a pox on each other’s contentment, didn’t notice the event at all. Until you’ve watched
roosters chase each other round and round, propelled by their hormones, you have no idea how much they can move like Groucho
Marx. They’re that sardonic too.

Only a few weeks ago the roosters were young enough to be called cockerels, their voices still breaking. One by one they tried
to crow as they lounged around the chicken yard, but the crowing always sounded as though Reynard the Fox had a paw on their
throats, or as though they were using a straight mute in their trumpets. Now they sing out loud and clear, in different pitches,
with widely differing takes on the canonical cock-a-doodle-doo. Why there should be so much pleasure in listening to the crowing
of a rooster who really knows his business I don’t understand. I sometimes imagine the sound the sun would make if we could
hear it coming up. I think of that sound as a great processional march—the musical movement of Sol’s robes over the eastern
sky—but not so grand that there wasn’t a note of hilarity in it. The hilarity is provided by a crowing rooster.

Watching these chickens grow, building a house for them, getting to understand how they regard the world, I’ve been surprised
again and again by how much of what I know about chickens comes from the cartoons I watched as a kid. Not that I expected
the senatorial presence of Foghorn Leghorn in our Buff Orpington roosters or the opulent, Odalisque-like preening of cartoon
hens. But I recognize the incessant barnyard drama from the cartoons, and when my dad and I built the chicken house in October
I couldn’t resist adding a slatted ramp of the kind that every cartoon chicken house always had. Now when I get up in the
middle of the night and see the chicken light burning, throwing a yellow glow out into the darkness, I find myself comforted
and go back to bed and to sleep.

T
he notes and observations in
The Rural Life
were written over several years, but they’ve been gathered together in these pages into a single calendar year. If spring
seems to be well advanced on one page but balky and weeks behind on the next, you can blame it on the weather or on the fact
that I’m probably describing two very different springs. I hope the occasional sudden shifts in the seasons of this book are
no more erratic than what the weather actually brings us these days.

Most of these brief essays were published in a different form on the editorial page of the
New York Times,
under the rubric “The Rural Life.” Others appeared in
The New Yorker, GQ, This Old House,
and
Double Take.
I’m indebted to Howell Raines, Gail Collins, and my colleagues on the
Times
editorial board. For their considerable editorial contributions along the way, I’d also like to thank Bob Gottlieb, Chip
McGrath, Ilena Silverman, Dave Grogan, Steve Petranek, and Albert LaFarge. I owe special thanks, as always, to my agent, Flip
Brophy.

The Rural Life
could not have been written without the daily help and inspiration of my wife and partner in rural living, Lindy Smith. She
knows better than anyone how much this book belongs to her.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG
was born in Colorado and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English
Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of
Making Hay
and
The Last Fine Time,
and his work has also appeared in many magazines. Since 1997 he has been a member of the editorial board of the
New York Times.
He lives in rural New York state with his wife, the photographer Lindy Smith.

This book was set in a digitized version of Baskerville, based on the typeface designed by typefounder and printer John Baskerville
in 1752. By the mid-eighteenth century, printing, paper, and typography standards had reached an all-time low. Baskerville
dramatically upgraded the craft of all three, producing beautiful volumes, including John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
in 1758, and Baskerville’s much-acclaimed masterpiece, the Cambridge University Bible, in 1763. Baskerville typefaces are
still much admired for their beautiful proportions and extreme legibility, making them well suited for both book design and
advertising.

“Klinkenborg can turn baling twine into poetry.”

—Tommy Hays,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

W
ith an eloquence unmatched by any other living writer. Verlyn Klinkenborg observes the juncture at which our lives and the
natural world intersect. His yearlong meditation on the rigors and wonders of country life—encompassing memories of his family’s
Iowa homestead, time spent in the wide-open spaces of the American West, and his experiences on the small farm in upstate
New York where he lives with his wife—abounds with vicarious pleasures for the reader as it indelibly records and celebrates
the everyday beauty of the world we inhabit.

A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year

A Book Sense 76 Pick

“
The Rural Life
is arresting, even profound, forcing us to look at the world
in a new way.”
—Beth Kephart,
Chicago Tribune

“In a voice reminiscent of E. B. White, Klinkenborg paints a picture of a fading world in colors that are solid and authentic.
His joy is evident throughout.”

—Patricia Weitz,
Los Angeles Times

“A revitalizing book.… Klinkenborg has developed an eye for luminous detail and
has found a language that revitalizes both
our memories and our experience of the
rural.… Finding the right words is Klinkenborg’s means of drawing himself
closer to
the world and delighting us with that offering.”

—Jim Heynen,
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time. He is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, National Geographic, Mother Jones, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications.