The Rural Life (9 page)

O
ne of the rules of perspective, which nearly everyone understands intuitively, is that distant objects only appear to be smaller than nearby objects. But imagine a world in which distant objects appear younger than nearby objects, and younger not on the narrow time scale of years or generations, but on an evolutionary time scale. In a world like that you would look at a horse on the distant horizon and see its distant ancestor, running rapidly away from you. The same horse, if it looked your way, would see only the rapidly receding ancestral human in you. This would be a hard world in which to measure time or distance.

Yet that’s the universe. Distant galaxies appear younger and less evolved than nearer galaxies because we look at them not only across distance, but also across time. Distant galaxies also appear to be moving more rapidly away from us than nearer ones because, in essence, they still preserve the momentum with which the earlier universe—as young as the light from those remote galaxies—was expanding. Looking out into space, we look into the past, and yet the farther we look, the younger the objects we see. Viewed in this light, “here and now” is the oldest, or rather the least young, place in the universe.

So how old is the universe? A team of scientists led by an astronomer from the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, has completed a survey of 800 stars called Cepheid Variables, and it indicates that the universe is probably between 12 billion and 13.5 billion years old. These are comforting numbers, if only because they mean that the universe is not younger than the stars within it, a result that earlier estimates had absurdly suggested. But for most of us, these are still problematic numbers. Something about counting in billions makes us dizzy. Previous estimates of the universe’s age ranged from 10 billion to 20 billion years. For some reason, this doesn’t sound like a very broad range of numbers, though a universe that’s 20 billion years old is obviously twice as old as one that’s merely 10 billion years old.

Around
A.D.
300, Eusebius concluded that the universe was created 5,198 years before the Incarnation of Christ. Even if the universe were only 12 billion years old, it would be 2,182,612 times older than Eusebius thought it was. Somehow that doesn’t convey the immensity it should. Neither does the fact that, given these new numbers, the universe is only a little more than three times as old as life on Earth. The difficulty doesn’t lie in the age of the universe. It lies in our tendency to imagine all those billions as a single sum and not as the slow progression of one year after another and another and another from the Big Bang till now.

T
he dry resonance at night—the ticking of insects—is not as authoritative as it will be in another month. Nor has the city begun to seep with heat, to melt at the crosswalks. Memorial Day is the porch before the house of summer, and spring is still latent here, still discernible in what blooms and hasn’t bloomed, in the constellations that haven’t yet risen to midsummer’s height. If summer is the flat light on a dead-calm sea, the haze that enshrouds the horizon after a week without rain, then this is a time when wind and water are still freshening, still disturbed by echoes from a more vehement season.

It’s always striking how holidays that begin as legislative events embed themselves in our sense of the year’s natural order. Memorial Day began as a Grand Army proclamation in 1868 to coordinate the decoration of the graves of the Union dead, and it was adopted as an official holiday in 1873 by New York State, the first state to do so. Over time, the holiday, and the decorating of graves with flowers, has embraced the dead from all of America’s wars, even as the day itself has lost its commemorative quality for many Americans.

But to anyone who has ever marched in an old-fashioned, small-town Memorial Day parade, there’s no forgetting the peculiar stir of feelings that this day brings. It’s a morning parade, and it makes its way to a cemetery on the edge of town, a place where cypress grows against the backdrop of cleanshaven lawn and fields of new-sprung corn. An odd moment occurs when the parade arrives at the cemetery. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and the members of the high school marching band look on while their elders, plainly moved though the day is bright and it’s not yet noon, honor men—mostly men—who barely figure in the minds of the young people trying to stand at attention. It’s always this way, the old honoring those who died young while the young wait impatiently nearby, disbelieving in death.

To enter summer with an act of solemnity, however slight, however quickly dispelled by the long afternoon that follows the parade, has a certain emotional fitness. It’s almost an apology for the thoughtless vitality of this season, a time when the naked exuberance of nature bears the living away into June and July and forgetfulness. Our job now is to live out all those summers that were lost to the men and women who died in wars past, as well as our own summers too. It’s no burden to do so.

S
uddenly the field grasses are knee-high, and in the woods the ferns have completely uncoiled. The first hay has already been cut. A light afternoon breeze now carries the tentative bleating of crickets and the hush of leaves in the trees, sounds that seem to advance the season a month or two. Recently the sun shone for five straight days—a feat virtually unexampled in the past calendar year—and high temperatures reached the seventies. By the third day of steady sun, a cautious delirium had spread among the damp-stained residents of the valley towns nearby. Many persons—especially the old male gossips in village post offices—thought the sunshine was nothing but a sucker play. The root of the New England character is incredulity, a state of chronic, weather-induced heartbreak, and this has been the kind of slow, cold spring in which that character was formed.

For most of May it seemed as though the woods would never give up their bud-red hue or the underlying russet tint of maple
flowers. Until a few days ago I could sit on top of a nearby mountain and see on the forest floor the white trunks of birches
felled by one of this season’s windstorms. The birches looked like the desiccated ribs of some enormous beast whose flesh
had melted away in the rain. The thermals rising from the east and west sides of the mountain converged along the ridge, trapping
a host of flying insects in turbulence. Swallows pillaged the insect cloud, chattering and diving in raucous motion, the rush
of air over their wings almost audible. Not far off, a squadron of vultures slid quietly along the sky, bare heads cocking
back and forth, eyes blinking imperturbably. From time to time, a vulture would flap its wings deeply—just once—to correct
some imperfection in its otherwise perfect flight.

Now the canopy of leaves has nearly filled in, and when a vulture slips below the horizon, it seems to disappear into the
deepening shade that defines the contours of the trees on distant hills. But spring hasn’t quite passed into summer yet. In
the late afternoon the sun spills through broken clouds onto the expanse of woods that lies west of here, a landscape that
rolls outward to the indistinct Catskills. For a moment, caught in that shifting light, the woods shine as bright as a field
of mustard.

T
wo kinds of mites have been ravaging bee populations in the United States for the past decade, and my bees are not immune.
When you open a healthy hive in midsummer, you can practically feel the frames of honey and brood cells quivering as you lift
them, resonating with the pulse of wingbeats and respiration from clustering bees. The enterprise is utterly alive, the collective
intact. I took that vitality more for granted than I should have. The bee colonies collapsed, the snows came, and all three
hives died. In one of them this spring I found the nest of a mouse that had eaten its way into the sweet darkness and wintered
over, unstung. So I began again, but in a different place, and with a renewed commitment to raise bees and let the honey take
care of itself. There are two hives now, and on warm days the entrances are choked with bees.

The hives used to stand in the shelter of a stone retaining wall beneath an old elderberry tree. As always, the elderberry
budded out in late March, buds as big as bumblebees. Then it stopped, seeming to wait for something that would allow it to
flower and bear fruit and draw cedar waxwings into its branches once again. But that something never came. Three weeks ago
I backed the tractor up to the tree, looped a chain around its trunk, and pulled ahead. The elderberry popped out of the ground
with almost no resistance. But where that dead trunk rose from the earth there’s now a stiff green brush of new elderberry
stems, two feet tall. They sprang out of nothing, in no time, as if the old trunk had been damming them up. Last weekend I
walked down to that corner of the garden and tried to comprehend that those bright stems are the same plant as that gnarled
old tree. I can’t quite grasp it.

For some reason the sight of that elderberry carried me back a year, to a hospice room in Sacramento where my stepmother,
Sally, whom I’d known for more than half my life, lay in a coma, dying. All life support had ceased, and those of us who gathered
around knew that the self within her had withdrawn for good. But the vigorous breathing continued, one day, then another and
another. I can still feel the force of those breaths, the elemental power of the reflex that drove them. The conscious life
we live seems so fragile that it comes as a shock to witness the organic thrust toward living that underlies it. I never understood
the optimism or the power of that reflex until I watched, hour after hour, the raw persistence of those unthinking breaths,
which finally ceased while my brother John and I stood over her one night. Our breathing seemed shallow by comparison.

S
ometimes it seems as though I grew up in the backseat of the family car, face plastered to the window. Summer after summer
we drove from Iowa to the Black Hills, to Wyoming, to Colorado, never eastward. We also lived a hundred miles, in opposite
directions, from both sets of my grandparents, whom we visited again and again. The car hummed along the high asphalt crown
between the ditches. We drove through thickets of grove shade and farm scent. Barnyards gaped suddenly as we passed and then
they closed again as quickly.