Late Summer: Netting

We were supposed to start in the late morning, but I didn't see any activity till just after noon, when Emmett went by in the white pickup with the broken intake manifold. Coming up the hill from the Feather Farm, the truck emits a particular signature, somewhere between the blat of Danny's dirt-track racer with a broken piston and the tinny roar of Dennis's Dodge Caravan without a muffler. The nets were piled up in back, stuffed into big black contractor bags.

I recognized them even before Emmett waved as he went past.  We'd packed those bags last fall, struggling to keep the nets from twisting or knotting up, leaving the bags at the end of their row of vines so Harry could slap duct tape on the side, writing the length of the net and its condition.  That was October. The grapes had been harvested weeks before, and denetting was the last communal work of the season.  The nets cut into your hands, already cold and stiff from the early morning frost just lifting as the sun reached higher.

The vineyard is up on a hill across the creek and past the clover field.  By an accident of acoustics, the rise next to the barn and the rise of the vineyard converse with each other the way you might have spoken to your sister or your friend with the tin cans and wire you used to make telephones as kids.  I could hear Emmett dropping the bags one by one at their rows, and then the truck headed back to the farm.

I'd been reading in one of the old metal lawn chairs the Old Man had refinished years ago, and I'd refinished years later, each of us certain our remedies would halt the inexorable return of rust, and each of us wrong. Now pockets of dry paint had floated up and cracked and the widening circles of dark rust rubbed off on your shorts while you sat there.  But it didn't matter.  These were chairs almost magical. Sitting in them, you were nearly touching the Old Man again, nearly hearing his voice, nearly watching him as he bent to the task at hand, patient, rigorous.

The Old Man had admired Harry for his workingman's ethic and his seeming inexhaustibility and the futility of so many of his programs.  The vineyard was one; the Old Man knew it was never to be a money maker and that troubled and enthralled him.  Why would anyone do something so difficult and so unlikely of success? I once told him that Harry and I made a game of calculating how much we made by the hour from our vocations.  Harry was a little ahead at 13 cents an hour when the Old Man died.

Agriculture of the sort that goes on around here doesn't really resemble farming, at least not as the last century has understood it.  There are machines involved, tractors, sprayers, mowers.  But the land is too discontinuous for mass-production monocrop cash farming except in the flat plains around the rivers where the fields wave with sweet corn destined for the markets and restaurants of New York City, an hour and a half south. The land rises irregularly beyond the floodplain, responding to millennia of wind and water, glaciers descending and receding, tearing the land from one spot, revealing the stony bones of the earth, leaving floods of gravel and broken rock. In the lower middle of our pasture, a granite upthrust emerges, hidden by the grasses of summer and the snows of winter, revealed in the spring floods.

In this broken topography, we adapt our desires. There's the clover field on Harry's side of the creek, where the floods go, and on our side there's the hayfield.  We share a part of the woodlot with its stands of sugar maples and its heritage chestnuts still standing though long dead from the blight.  Some times are for cutting down and dragging out those old trees to be sold to the cabinet makers; some times are for syruping off and some for haying and some for gathering the old planks from outbuildings that washed into the creek in the hurricane or the big spring flood and can be put up in the half-collapsed woodshed to be used when someone comes with a restoration project.

Today it was netting time. The first year the vineyard was mature enough to produce well, Harry had walked the rows with his friend and teacher and they'd agreed it was nearly time.  That was a Saturday, and Harry had called the crew and told them harvest was going to start early Monday morning.  On Sunday afternoon he stopped by the vineyard to drop off some tools and found the vines stripped bare.  It was surreal, the sort of disorientation you might have felt when you came out in the morning to get in your car and found it wasn't where you'd left it, and you wandered up and down the street, unable to believe it had been stolen. Harry, too, had wandered between the rows, stooping occasionally to see where the grapes had once been, until he came to the place that Nick had mowed too close, leaving the center shaved to dirt, and saw, in the dust, the dense interweaving of tracks from a rafter of wild turkeys. It was a bad year, worst of them all, though there'd been other bad years, years when nothing came of the harvest but a gallon of sour grapejuice, when the weather went south-- a late frost or an early hurricane or a sudden violent thunderstorm throwing hail. You couldn't do much about weather, but you could net the vines and keep the birds out.  So we did.

 I was heading down to the house when Emmett pulled into the driveway in the pickup, its bed carrying the rest of the tools,  a cooler populated by old juice jars washed out and now filled with ice-water, and the last few netting bags. It's time, right? I called.  I'm just going up to change: no buttons, long sleeves, long pants, gloves.  He came out of the cab anyway.  I wanted to tell you, he said.  I was up at the vineyard Saturday and I got a  free live music concert. Nice stuff. Made me want to dance up there.

The big band had trouped in on Friday, taking over the studio, turning up the amps and working up the sets to play on Sunday down at the outdoor gig. It had been a noisy weekend, punctuated by feasts and field trips and long stories and tender fingertips and hoarse voices by the end. Now they'd packed up, promising to call when they made it home safely, dawdling in the driveway, the car windows rolled down so as to talk through just one more thing, before backing out and heading up the hill to Mountain Rest Road and then up Main Street in New Paltz and onto the Thruway.

When I got up to the vineyard Harry had brought the tractor round with the netting trailer hooked behind. He and Peter Lundgren had devised the thing; it was a contraption with chain and angled metal and a platform where Emmett would stand to pay out the netting from the bags through the raised guide as two of us, me on one side, Dennis on the other, would walk along behind, laying the netting across the long rows of vines. Dennis wasn't there yet, and while we waited for him we occupied ourselves with the small chores that make it go more smoothly later-- untying the bags and setting them within easy reach; testing the machinery.  Then the three of us went down the rows, picking off the grapes that had already been pecked by the birds. You need to get them out, to interrupt the beautiful cycle that doesn't include human harvest or wine as part of its rhythm:  bird; yellowjacket; moth; mold.

Dennis took the left side; I took the right.  A few of the netting bags had been hand-loaded last year, after the ritual of October, for reasons I don't remember.  But those nets were twisted up, and by chance the first two rows were trouble. When the nets twist, the solution is to spin the bag but it takes some time to get the instinct for which way to go, clockwise or counterclockwise.  Midway through the second row Emmett remembered the routine, untwisting from the farthest spot back, and then continuing that spin down to the bag.  We were ready to settle in.

The day had dawned cool, more like late September than mid-August. Now, though, the sky was cloudless, an intense, almost metallic blue that made the leaves of the sycamore trees at the vineyard's edge seem alternately vivid green and near-silver.  The sweat stained our long shirts and pants and we pulled them away from the skin underneath as we walked back up from the finished rows, kicking the nets underneath the vines so the tractor wouldn't catch on them when Harry took it down the next row.

There was some casual talk--about the troubles with permits that had closed down the Hopped-Up Cafe where the other band played and where Emmett's brother was a regular; about the noisy motorcycle Danny Cross had bought to replace the customized pickup with the glass-pack mufflers he'd had to sell; about the grass-killer Emily had sprayed around her vegetable patch; about the variable amount of chlorine in the Rosendale municipal water we were drinking-- but mostly the talk was focused on the task at hand. Taking up slack! Emmett would call, and he'd hold the netting still while the tractor moved forward. Rip!  meant a segment of the netting was torn open and Dennis and I would have to be careful to lay it right so that later Harry could come by and close up the holes with clips and string.

There were 23 rows, and we didn't take but one water break:  the flow of things seemed to resist the idea of stopping and then starting up again.  Once in a while a car or a pickup would drive past.  Toward the end, the girls who lived in the brick house came out with their babysitter and the little dog and raced around the new-mown clover field, spraying each other with water pistols while the dog dug through the hayrows to find the dead-- voles, field mice, snakes, the occasional rabbit who had leapt the wrong way as the tractor and the haymow came up. Then they went in, and we set on the last row without speaking at all, leaving only the sough of the wind in the evergreens over on the far hillside and the grumble of the little tractor's 20 horsepower engine, still steady though the tractor dated to the '40s.

And then we were done. Two and a half hours, Harry said: half as long as last year, which was better than any year previous.  We stood around the tractor for a little while, talking about the differences in technique this year from last. Then it was time to move on.  Harry took the tractor back to the Feather Farm.  Emmett took the pickup.  Dennis drove off in his ancient Dodge Caravan with the bad muffler, and I walked down the hill to the house and, behind it, to the studio, to pull the cables and the mics from the carry-all bin and reassemble the practice space for tomorrow, when Kim and Sevan and David and Jim would assemble, to work on the next song, and the next.

I no longer practice alone.  It has come to seem alien, even unseemly.  What is the point of working on technique when what matters in the end is finding the time, feeling the music breathe, waiting for someone to suggest, someone else to affirm, then to take it up for a while, and then hand it off or set it down?

When we left the tumult and compression of the city for this place, it seemed we were moving from communality to solitude. But we'd had it backwards.  Now even the dead commune with us, in dreams,  in the wind, in the moon's travel, in fragments of words to be crafted into song, or work, or wine, in the talk of those we work beside or those who listen to us, as we work, while they, too, make the small adjustments, move rhythmically down the rows, lay things out in order, stopping, now and then, to hear the music swell from the old barn, cross the creek, and rise up the hillside to the vineyard.

Traffic vs. Weather

Traffic vs. Weather


When we first encountered the fifteen-minute-long weather reports that aired four times a day here, we found them charming, but exasperating.  Meteorologist Paul Caiano's discussion of regional weather broken into six separate reports seemed quixotic, affording variations so small as to be invisible.  How much could things vary between the Mid-Hudson Valley and the Litchfield Hills a half-hour away?  By contrast, his discussion of major weather events in the past 24 hours, with their attention to the last waterspout reported in the South Pacific and the global and continental low and high temperature records for the day, seemed a bit like showing off.  Ciaano's high, nasal voice rose and fell but his emphases seemed wrong, as if he was reading something handed him just moments before airtime.

We were used to Chicago's radio, where the weather reports were quick, informative, personable.  It's gonna be a bad one out there tonight:  you bundle up or, better yet, just stay at home and snuggle with a good book or a loved one. The weather reports were appended not to news but to traffic;  in fact it was traffic that mattered, and the segment titles agreed:  whether on the 8s or on the tens or on the half-hour, it was always Traffic and Weather, not the other way around. The tone of the announcer didn't change between the two;  in fact, most of the time weather was there to explain traffic, or to prepare you for workarounds-- take the train, not the bus; make sure your windshield wipers are working well; stay off the I-90 corridor where there's bound to be semis jack-knifed or stalled where bridge freezes before road surface. 

We bought the farm just after the Great Crash of 2007.  For a few years we had looked at real estate in Chicago, more than a little skeptically.  Various agents would solicit our interest, and some of the places were interesting;  they promised the possibility of changing lives by changed geographies. In Chicago, a shift of neighborhood is also a shift of transportation, which brings new faces in the train cars or the buses, and new vistas out the windows.  After the awkward first months, things would settle down;  you'd recognize people whose schedules matched yours, and you could imagine their lives, filling in the stories as new details emerged.  Similarly, there'd be places you'd look for;  a tree that, so vivid so early in the fall, might not make it through till spring, or an explosion of yellow forsythia in a yard that grew dense and green over the spring and summer. Just the repainting of a carwash sign would, for a time, be a cause for comment.

We'd been in the same place long enough that those pleasures had dulled.  The Red Line, our train line, was rebuilding half its roadbed; everything would be slower, more awkward, frustrating. And we'd read the reports on the importance of home ownership, of real estate investment, of wealth building. We weren't the sort to watch investment infomercials on television, but there was a vague sense of opportunity left behind. So we started, haphazardly at first. Then, as the calls began to come, and the notices appeared in the inbox daily, then hourly, we found ourselves part of a new class of people, new to us, at least:  house-hunters.

There were places that looked out at vast sweeps of cemetery, places tucked in what seemed improbably like cul-de-sacs-- improbably, because Chicago's grid forbids the frivolity of small closed areas or hidden clusters of people and houses.  There were run-down two-flats and converted manufacturing lofts and bungalows in neighborhoods where police and fire families had lived for generations.  There were places we felt we might be welcome, and places where we knew we would always be outsiders.

What all had in common was the price:  too high for us.  And when we pointed this out to the broker, he or she (always better dressed than we were, always with a nicer car and a more perfect sheen to the skin) would look at us blankly.  Then would begin the homily on remedies:  second mortgages secured by a note-of-hand to bridge the down payment, specialty mortgages with escalation tiers and cascading principal payments and guaranteed rate-links and refi codas.  It was religion, and we knew it.

So we stayed in the rambling rundown top-floor walkup that looked out onto a small beach where the drummers assembled for their drum circles, and the boys with their baseball hats with the tags still on them cocked crazily on their modified afros as they perched on the backs of the park benches, warily eyeing each other while the lifeguard watched them from the top of the tall white chair. We were immunized from danger by Georgie the dog, whom the gangbangers had adopted a few years before, because she was so very old and so careful as she walked, and because she was direct in her relations with all people, and received directness in return.  In the winter, they would stop us to ask how she was doing; was the salt still hurting her paws; did she mind it when it was this cold? In the summer, when we would bring her out to the beach, they wouldn't look at us from their stations on the benches, but their hands might stray down, casually, almost as if by accident, so that Georgie could put her nose in the warm palm and nudge it gently before going on.  

Back East, at the edge of the Hudson Valley, the old man and the old woman were often sick, or in need, and we found ourselves driving over the Skyway, into Indiana, then Ohio, Pennsylvania, crossing into New York at Port Jervis, then reversing the drive a few days later. As the market faltered, we began to think of buying something there, something that could draw us when the time came. We had not planned to live long in Chicago;  we were Easterners, both of us, and the sublimity of the Midwest and the spectacles of a vertical city you could observe from a distance, approach, enter, and then exit, smoothly, with a steady continuum of rise and fall: these were treasures we spoke of to others, to visitors and outsiders, but with less and less enthusiasm and more and more duty in our voices and gestures. As the apartment crumbled around us, we looked eastward.

The farm had been a real estate disaster.  You wouldn't have guessed it from the gorgeous webvideo Mary Collins Real Estate had produced back when the market was smokin'; Pachelbel's Canon played in the background and the vaseline-smeared lens idealized the soggy wet stretches where the hayfield approached the creek.  There weren't any interior views of the house or the barn;  instead, there were carefully crafted approaches to the buildings that accentuated their rural and colonial heritage. You'd never guess that the old wideboards had been covered with pine and the plaster walls with wainscoting and the only trace of a kitchen was a stove stuck improbably in the main room, with a bathroom vanity for a sink and a refrigerator always and only filled with pizza boxes from Benny's and gigantic bottles of Pepsi and Sprite.

Before Mary Collins stepped in, the couple who'd owned it had attempted to exploit the letter of the zoning dating back to the 1950s, parceling out the acreage into fifteen one-acre lots, proposing paved lanes that they must have imagined would be magically impervious to the relentless drainage from the ridge to the creek, magically immune from the state's wetland regulations.  When the proposal died on the desk of the town planner, they were disgusted;  for weeks afterward, they raced their all-terrain-vehicles in great loops around the property, the halogen headlights illuminating the stubble and warning them away from the deep rivulets, sometimes dry and hard, sometimes brimful with snowmelt or the runoff from a sudden storm.  They relented and redrafted:  four five-acre luxury-living sites with the wetlands redesignated as common parkland and playground.  This time they made it to committee, where they sat, we're told, stiff and silent as the planning board asked them questions they could not answer.

And so they turned it over to Mary Collins, and to the soft-focus videographer and to Pacelbel's Canon. By then, though, they were a year behind the market, and their new place on Long Island, so attractive, so affordable when they'd bought it in giddy anticipation of their real-estate speculations, now had entered the second tier of its multi-story stairway of rate increases, and refinancing, once the equivalent of a brisk walk from one department at the bank to another, now became something closer to one of those dreams in which it is impossible to run, and then to walk, until you feel yourself falling forward in slow motion toward the quicksand in front of you.

Shortly after the third tier payment increase kicked in on that place on Long Island, and long after Mary Collins had graciously bowed out of the picture, they sold us the farm.  For a year after that, I continued the drive back and forth whenever the university schedule gave me seven days or more.  The furniture back then consisted of an inflatable bed, a card table, and six extruded plastic lawn chairs, one of which stayed at the table with the laptop.  Oh, and a dog bed.

We thought we'd continue that way for a while, but the tug was too great.  Even now, with the hayfield nearly obscured by the steady fall of snow, and the heat in the house and the studios only barely able to keep up with the steelhard cold that locks the pools down at the wetlands into grey lessons in the geography of small dangers, and the creek longer audible under the waves of ice it has made of itself.  Even now, when, I am sure, back in Chicago the buses run in the tracks made by the city snowplows and the most intrepid of hipsters are still riding their single-speed bikes down Milwaukee Avenue toward the School of the Art Institute or the design studio in the South Loop.  Even now, I know what it means to recognize a place as home.

Traffic and Weather on the 8s was more than a comforting murmur to us.  To those who drove, it was the most important part of the radio morning or evening.  If you lived in the suburbs, or the exurbs, or reverse commuted to one of those office parks out in edge city, you knew that the Jane Addams was actually a fragment of Interstate 90 heading northwest past O'Hare Airport and Schaumburg;  that the Ike was the Eisenhower and the Eisenhower was I-290; that the Bishop Ford was I-94 and you didn't want to take it if there was any way around it. Repair crew incidents or rollover accidents were Greek tragedies into which you found yourself, perhaps merely as a member of the chorus, but perhaps as Lear or Macbeth or Oedipus. When traffic came on, you stopped what you were doing in mid-gesture;  your eyes turned inward as you visualized the elaborate network of roadways, felt the ebb and flow of them, probing for the places where the ripple effect would be least.  Perhaps your lips moved in a silent litany as you added up the different times, discarding one, holding another in your pocket, just in case, the way an old woman counted score at cribbage or rummy.

These days, we treat Paul Caiano and his weather reports with a similar intensity of attention.  What was once charming or eccentric is now urgent;  what seemed rambling or deliberately overstuffed is now taut, even compressed. There's a reason for every part of it, even the most obscure or distant in geography.  That waterspout over the Sea of Japan:  it will never reach us here, but it does remind us that our dangers and catastrophes have their counterparts or trump cards far from us.

 It's not just that they close the schools when the snow forecast looks bad. The superintendent is up at 6, waiting for the first of Caiano's reports, his computer open to the email address of the school closing hotline. This is a stretch of country with many hills, some mountains, and very little in the way of surplus tax revenue.  A plow with a sander on the back has to cover most of three or four hamlets, and the driver is paid by the hour, not by the day, week or year.  We may get out today.  Or we may not. Or worse:  we may not get home.

That's the winter's tale.  In the summer, when the thunderstorms race down the mountains toward us, a hailstorm can flatten Harry's vineyard in a half-hour and end the year's harvest. In the fall and spring, there's the threat of clashes between cold fronts coming in from the north and warm air heading from the south, picking up moisture as it meanders out over the Atlantic and then back in again. Wild bursts of water, inches in an hour, can overwhelm the drain tile in the fields and leave the corn or the pumpkins, the beans or the peppers, mired in, where they can rot in days, ruining the season and dimming the hope for the down payment on a new haymow or corn harvester.

Or there may be nothing here at all, nothing but blue skies, puffy white clouds, a pleasant breeze, everything a weekender up at the b&b at the top of the hill imagined when they made the online reservation months ago.  But up past Ashokan Reservoir and Phoenicia, in the dense cover of the Catskills Park, such a storm will sweep in and then disappear, invisible to the valley.  An hour later, you can hear the creek begin to rumble as you stand in the kitchen listening to Paul Caiano on the radio:  rumble, then develop sibilants, the percussive cracks as the water throws tree limbs and pieces of storage sheds or old mobile homes up over the banks before it, too, rises over the edge and then spreads quick and, by comparison with the main channel, silent, unobtrusive, up past the outhouse, toward the main house, and the sump pumps go on in the cellar and the crawl space, and they don't stop, even as the sun shines as cruelly as ever, the clouds waft past, reflected in the spreading pool that threatens the second haying.

The descriptions of fronts and troughs, of warm air massing off the Outer Banks or a Manitoba Clipper gaining strength isn't exotic color any more.  It's a compilation of possibilities, and you listen with your gaze turned inward, working out the calculus that could mean hailstorm or blizzard, or a line of small tornadoes dropping improbably onto the bucolic stretches of hayfields and dairy cattle up and down our valley, tornadoes like the one that ripped the front off our barn three years before we bought the place, when Pachelbel's Canon was still the ode to the place.

They cancelled school early this morning.  As a consequence, the town didn't call the plow drivers to the garage.  Better to wait; three inches on the roads slows things down, but most everyone has an all-wheel-drive car or a pickup, or big tough snow tires with aggressive tread, tires that spew mud up the sides of the car when the thaw lasts more than a day or so.  The plow came by at 10, doing a quick pass so the van that takes the group-home patients to dialysis and physical therapy and to medical appointments could make its morning run from the place up in the woods at the top of the hill, behind the Bushes.  About an hour ago, as the sky was visibly darkening, I heard it come again, just ahead of the return trip; when I looked up from shoveling the walk, I saw the van go by, slow, stately, the guys strapped into their wheelchairs high up inside the windows, looking out indifferently at the line of evergreens striped with white and the man in the old parka with a shovel, and a dog racing around him, reveling in the snow.

The Early Morning Sirens

They went off just after 6 am, undulating wails continuing for three minutes or so, then stopping for a minute or two before recommencing.  It was still dark, and we lifted our heads off the bed to see if we could tell which fire station it came from.  Then we waited to see if the big pickups from up the hill would blast past the house, their flashing blue volunteer lights on the dashboard.  That would have meant Stone Ridge, or Kripplebush.  When that happens you can’t help it; you start to worry that it’s the house of someone you know.

Of course it’s unlikely.  We don’t know people who smoke in bed, or fall asleep on the couch with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and those are the most common causes of fire around here, especially at that hour.  The coal smolders in the mattress or cushion, until the acrid smoke awakens someone, or the alarm clock sounds and someone rolls over to turn it off and sees the tendrils of flame around the bedroom door.

It’s the late-day sirens that should concern us.  Then it’s brush fires that catch the edge of a woodlot, or move through the dried cornstalks of the neighboring field.  Or it’s an electrical fire, a snapping arc unheard in the noise of the floor sander or the table saw that overloaded the antiquated knob-and-tube wiring in the ceiling or walls, the insulation long rotted off the wires set too close together back some eighty years or so ago.  Most everyone with an old house has some knob-and-tube somewhere, even if the electrical has been upgraded.  The weekenders, probably not:  they had everything ripped out before they moved in, at the recommendation of a local contractor, maybe Brian, or Clint, or Kurt, or Will, who knew these clients could pay whatever it took for absolute peace of mind, and pitched the job accordingly.

The rest of us live in houses where the electrical has been upgraded haphazardly.  In the ‘50s and ‘60s, BX cable came in;  it was great for snaking through and around old plaster-and-lathe walls, with its flexible metal outer shield, also rodent-proof.  Later materials were safer, but not so resilient or adaptable to the complexities of old houses built in stages by country people without much money but long stretches of time available for home handiwork.

Still, there are places where it’s just about impossible to replace the wiring.  In the lofts that were once attics, long ago converted to bedrooms with bunk beds for children too many for the house, who grew up and left, moving to the cities or the suburbs, where there was work and possibility.  In the crawl spaces under the kitchens that were built ramshackle atop the clay soil and, after they’d done their initial settling, hunkered down and grasped the main house firmly, holding on more tightly with every coat of new paint on the outside, the work done by the owner or by a neighbor free to do chore-work between seasons, painters who would stop and get a hammer and nails to tidy up where things had separated, or who might add a length of 1x2 furring to close up the draft coming from the crack between parts of the house.

Even a skinny electrician, well-paid with weekender dollars, isn't eager to take on a crawl-space job.  First you have to check for mice, but also for possums and groundhogs and skunks who have taken up housing down there where it’s warmer and close to the compost heap or the apple barrels. Then there are the spiders;  grown men who wouldn’t think twice about brushing a hornet off their arm will pause before confronting the pale-white spiders who live in that eternal darkness beneath the hum and clatter of domestic life. Then there’s the standing water that accumulates, particular after a rainy fall or spring.  It’s not much—not enough to justify a sump pump or some complicated drainage plan, but when you are inching along on your back, with your toolbelt turned around and a spool of electrical wire between your knees, it’s not pleasant to feel the water seeping into your hair.

It’s not that regular electricians charge too much for this work. We’re talking about the ones who know you and have been out before to fix the strange little blackout that hit a ceiling fixture in the living room, an outlet in the hall, and the front door lamp, the crazy breaks that happen when the replacement wiring was done by expediency and not logic, wiring probably done by their father or uncle when they owned the business some decades ago.  No, they won’t even give you a price.  It’d be too much to do that stretch, they tell you.  It’s not worth it to you; as importantly, it’s not worth it to them. I refuse to charge you what it would cost to do it, they tell you.

So that little stretch of knob-and-tube stays there.  More than likely, they disconnect it, and they run channel along the walls, low and close to the baseboard, or down where the baseboard meets the floor, to power the outlets and the lights that once depended on that wiring down there. Most of us have that sort of wiring interspersed throughout the house—along the ceiling of the dining room, down from the upstairs hall light to the bottom of the stairs, or leading to the outside light that goes on when guests from out of town are coming in after dark and might run into the propane tank or just keep driving down into the drainage swale, thinking they’re still in the driveway when they’re definitely not.

But of course you don’t know who did the work for the previous owner, even if you’ve had the house for fifty years.  Maybe that owner himself, Mr. Pratt, or Mr. DeGraw, did the work, and he left the wiring hot while he was laying in the new channel, so as to have power continuously, especially as he was doing that work between chores and jobs that called him away, and that wire went to the toaster or the floor furnace or some other indispensable part of everyday life.  There are back rooms of houses around here, rumpus rooms and tool rooms and tack rooms and junk rooms, where the wiring’s still left, half-done, from 1953, the conduit and the outlet boxes piled in the corner, awaiting the attentions of a man dead for decades or living, barely living, in the county nursing home up in Kingston, the oxygen tank strapped to the wheelchair and the television eternally blaring, a premonition of purgatory, or hell. 

Even if it’s finished, there’s always the chance that he forgot to cut off power to the old line, or simply undid the connections at the electrical box, where some later owner, or some electrician called in for another problem, reconnected it to see if that was the quick fix to what might otherwise be a long and tedious search for the real cause.

Hornets build nests.  Groundhogs dig past the weak spot in the foundation and, if they’re confronted by a rotted piece of wire dangling across their next venture, they might gnaw it, or maybe just push it aside—push it enough so that, when the next rains come, and the crawl space takes on a little water, the puddle reconnects hot and ground, and the wiring sparks, again and again, against the three-hundred-year-old beam, softened by dry rot or carpenter ants, ripe as tinder for the flicker and the wisp of smoke.

Now’s the season when these things happen. Now, when the first frost is hinted in the silver sheen of the topcoating on the haygrass back toward the creek.  Now, when the dry leaves rustle as the bear comes in from the woodlot to steal the windfall apples beneath the tree furthest from the house. Now, when you look up from the firewood splitter to watch the phalanx of geese in their call-and-response arc across the grey sky. Now, when the groundhog moves from his summer home in the cool darkness beneath the unheated barn, and seeks a place where the heat of human comfort leaks down through the wideboards of the kitchen floor. Now, when the mice begin to look for every possible scavenge to insulate their winter nests.  Now, when the sirens wail at 6:08, as the sky’s just showing light, and we raise our heads and try to be sure just which station it’s coming from, secretly saying: it’s not us, I know that. I hope it’s not Harry, with the band saw set up in the dining room of the old farm.  I hope it’s not Patrick and Cindy in that new house they’ve rented, plugging things into unfamiliar sockets. I hope it’s not Jake. I hope it’s not Ike. I hope. I hope.

Those whispered secrets travel along the circuits of community.  They, too, are fragile.  Some are old, and frayed.  Some are new and untested.  Most of them are so ingrained in the everyday life around here that you don’t even know they’re there until the siren sounds and you bring them to mind, and heart, and prayer.

Some Necessary Lies

Down past the end of the hayfield and into the woodlot where in late fall you can see the surveyor’s stakes that delineate where our property ends and Harry’s begins, the creek makes a pair of quick turns.  In between, there’s a deep pool with the stump of a great tree sitting improbably upright where deep becomes shallow again.  That tree when it fell was the cause of that deep place;  during one hurricane and another, and through the fall and spring floods, rushing water, diverted under the massive trunk fallen across the stream, dug and dug until some equilibrium was reached or perhaps just until Peter Lundgren came and cut up the obstruction. 

It was a three-day job, far longer and more complex than he had expected.  The tree was oak, and oak-hard, and the water too deep to stand where a few judicious cuts with the chainsaw might have freed the great logs to fumble their way downstream, likely grounding at the next wide curve, down toward the gristmill where, in a couple of years, they could be assailed again, to be cut up for firewood. 

There was also the very real danger that comes with a powerful chainsaw wielded under unstable conditions—ground underfoot that was part slippery rocks and part shifting sand and mud; hardwood sodden and in places still living, making for unexpected changes in the way the saw might move; and, toward the end, the weight of the pieces clamping on the cut. 

Normally, Peter told me, you cut from above and below in two opposed V formations, but this was impossible, for the trunk was still half under water. The days were hot and sticky, and the flies and mosquitoes were heavy and difficult to ignore. When he was done, he’d sliced the tree into four parts, with only the middle two headed downstream.  The still-leafy upper branches stayed on our peninsula, to be propelled by the next great storm, the one that washed great swaths of the Catskill Mountains down the slopes, swept most of two villages away, and brought portions of houses, house trailers and woodsheds to us. The next spring, Harry complained, only half-joking, that we’d sent that awkward, debris-clad monstrosity down to the gristmill’s waterfall just to ensure that he’d have to pay Peter twice for the same project.

On the other side, Harry’s side, the stump, five feet high, its remaining big roots forming an irregular ball more than eight feet across, tilted near-horizontal through the end of summer and the winds of fall, until the great storm of mid-October.  We didn’t live here all the time back then. It was sheer chance that we’d been back for a long weekend of closing-up when the storm came in from the Atlantic, flooding much of New York City and leaving sudden lanes of knocked-down trees and yawing power lines sweeping diagonally across the hillsides up here.

So we didn’t see the stump again till Christmas time, when we went back down with the old dog in the first snow of the season.  There it was, perfectly upright, on an island of its own making in the middle of the deep spot where the creek turns.  It seemed impossible.  At first we imagined it was some other stump, washed down from far upmountain, but the next day, when the sun had melted the snow off its top, we could see the complex trajectories of Peter’s experiments with geometry, physics, and biology, with the angle of the chain, the power of the saw, the stubborn resistance of the waterlogged tree. 

It sits there still, some years gone.  Today we walked with the new young dog, and when we got to the stony places before the deep pool, he threw himself enthusiastically into the water, wallowing, drinking, and then turning his three tight turns before laying himself down in the shallows for a few moments, cooling himself from his wild running in the hot  late-August sun. Downstream from him, in the places where the water had fallen enough to bring the bottom stones up to bask in the dappled sunlight, leaves, some of them already orange and brilliant red and yellow, clung and nestled, as if placed there.  Up and down the creek from that vantage point, only a single leaf actually floated, delicately, atop the slow water. Back up to the hayfield, we stopped for a moment to watch a chevron of geese heading south-southeast above us, braying their itinerary to each other, calling out the corrections and then settling in to the long trip.

How do the geese, the trees, the haymown grasses staying brown despite the rains and the warm sun, know what we do not, that it is still summer, but it is also fall, disguised by hot spells and sudden thunderstorms, by barbecues and mornings reading the papers in the lawn chairs beside the stonework patio Dan has built for us? I know what it is. I am a studious observer and I have spent most of my life in places like this, where hot summers always mute to fall and then to bitter winters with the irregular iron-hard ground unsteadying your feet as you walk from the house to the barn or studio or the car in the morning darkness. The angle of the sun grows longer and the time it is high overhead diminishes.  The darkness comes sooner day by day, so I look up surprised from my work to see that the clock in the window and the light beyond it contradict one another—it is seven, still an hour from time to print out the day’s work and carry it in to go over while sitting in the chair on the grass, and yet it is already too dark to read the words were I ready to end the sentence here and summon the printer to click and hum.

The verb is wrong:  the trees don’t know, nor the geese, nor the haygrass.  They are organisms responding to loss of what they need for their exultant lives. And, as yet, we don’t know either; it is August still, for a few more days, and we express a mild sort of outrage that the living things around us are so wrong in their judgment.

Soon, though.  Soon it will be time to call Nick and contract with him for a new load of firewood.  Time to relight the pilot on the propane furnace, and take the air conditioner out of the studio window so the storm windows can go on and the screens be lugged up to their winter home in the hayloft. Time to look for the bin of sweaters up in the attic crawl-space, and bring out the bags of winter coats, hats, gloves, thick socks and sturdy boots.

Between this moment, still summer, only measurably late by the evidence we view with disbelief, and that one, when hard darkness seeps through the bare scuttling branches, there will be days of a plangent beauty unimaginable now, while the rumble of thunder cuts through the wet, exhausted air, days we don’t believe yet, despite the evidence we amassed last fall, when we trapped the best leaves between sheets of waxed paper and ironed them, just as we had when we were children, and then again when our children were young and the ritual was new to them.

All the rest of what is around us knows.  It is we who do not know.  It is past time to buy a generator so the sump pumps will not fail us when the next hurricane knocks the power out for hours or days.  It is past time to have talked to Nick about that firewood; he is back in school now and may not have time for weeks or longer to take Harry’s tractor out to the fallen trees in the far woodlot and drag them to a clearing, set up the mechanical splitter, cut the logs, and leave them open to the sun and air long enough that they will burn hot and clean come November. And so I will be out behind the barn myself, in a month or so, cutting up the old rail fencing, splitting the slices of oak from what Peter salvaged of the fallen tree, now, finally, purged of the deep-soaked remainders of the high creek that brought someone’s shed, almost intact, tumbling end-over-end to smash, disintegrating, into the stubborn tree that had stood for a century or more before finally falling across the imaginary line that separates one piece of property from another, one season from the next.  Cut and split and stack; my hands will be blistered in new places, different from the blisters of the rake and the hoe in the spring or the wheelbarrow and the paint scraper in the summer. Then bring the first loads in to the woodbins by the two fireplaces, the old one small and narrow accommodating only a single day’s fuel, or maybe two; the new one, the one that Harry designed, knowing what we had forgotten, how long is the trek up the hill and past the stand of evergreens, flashlight in one hand, carrier in the other, to replenish  what should have been enough for this cold spell, this blizzard, but was not: this new one big enough that it can take two loads from the trailer we inherited from the old man along with the tractor that he loved so immoderately. He is gone now, and that, too, is something we do not believe, yet. 

It is good that we are not so honest as the geese, the trees, the haygrass.  We will stand as we do now, soaked by the sudden rain, and count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the snap of close thunder.  We will sit and read the papers in the morning, watching the edge of the woods, persuading ourselves that the dense green is not already tinged with just a hint of yellow, that the red leaves and brown and orange that we see trapped in the creek, glistening and supersaturated by the gloss of the water, are just evidence of the stress of hot weather and the sudden unexpected violence of the stormy winds. Despite ourselves, we will not prepare but will instead revel in what is, in what will soon be memory, and regret and, flickering, anticipation of each next moment. 

Waiting for Rain at the Farm

I’ve been rebuilding a big powered speaker we used to use for Siobhan’s old standup bass, a band and a half back, when I was living in Chicago. I’ve been waiting for the rain, but it hasn’t come yet.  Now for a moment the sun has come out, though the clouds are black in every direction.

 The parts came in two installments. First the brown UPS truck stopped where the driveway used to turn in—it’s backwards to the road, but safer than trying to pull over when there’s no shoulder and a sudden drop into the ditch that races with floodwater when it rains hard. That was the big JBL high-frequency driver for the horn; we’d blown that at a charity gig for a group home for the developmentally disabled. It didn’t matter that much when you’re using it as a low-frequency bass amp.  Then we managed to break the input and that pretty much sidelined the thing.  The UPS guy knows me pretty well by now; he commented that the package was too heavy to be a book, and it wasn’t from Amazon, which is the usual reason for him to stop by. I told him what it was for and he sympathized.

The second was from Brian Hendrix down in Florida; it was the input component console.  He’d sent it Priority Mail, which made sense from his end—he’s in a nondescript quasi-industrial park south of Orlando, and it’s not far from the post office on Michigan Avenue, right on the way to the entrance to the Florida Turnpike. Priority has the advantage these days of including automatic package-tracking, too, which can matter when you’re sending a lot of packages of sensitive electronic components to people who are depending on you to have things ready for the next bar or lounge gig.

But Sharon doesn’t get out of her little white truck, so if something doesn’t fit in the mailbox, she doesn’t deliver. In fact, she sorts the mail, along with Kathy and Dennis, so she doesn’t have to bother putting most packages on the truck—she just fills out the yellow-green delivery attempted card and puts the package in the pickup shelves. If I get the mail in the afternoon, I can go straight in and pick up the package rather than waiting for her to return to the post office and let someone file it. 

Yesterday I was going over the copyedits of the Dylan chapter, and it was complicated—I was having to listen to every song I’d quoted to make sure I had the words exactly right, and Harry and I were supposed to go out riding at 4. I called him at 3:30, knowing he was fabricating the kitchen cabinets for the farmhouse, and was probably going to get himself wrapped up in the sequence and the details and lose track of time. 

As it turned out, he couldn’t extricate himself from the glue and the clamps till just after 5, so I didn’t check the mail till 7:30 when we got back. It was close to dark by then;  the clouds had been moving in since 4, and Harry said we’d have rain after midnight.  The big corporate weather site had said not till this morning, but Harry has lived here all his life, so I tend to believe him, and not to fault him when he’s wrong.  We are in what’s loosely called the Hudson Valley—the gentle swale that great river has cut over epochs, as it has wandered between the Litchfield Hills over in Connecticut, and the Catskills over here in New York. In fact, ours is the Rondout Valley, carved by that river between the obdurate conglomerate stone of the Shawangunks, the easternmost vestige of the old Appalachian range, and the Catskills.  Because it’s a valley in a valley,  weather is quixotic, and our own valley, formed by the Kripplebush Creek, is even more isolate and unpredictable.  Often you can sit on the old metal lawn chair that’s on the uphill side of the barn, sunlight on cool mornings, shade on hot afternoons, and watch the thunderstorms rage in a line five miles north, marching west to east, for hours.

I checked the mail and brought it in, putting the delivery notice on the dining room table before sorting the mail into its four piles—hers, mine, catalogues, junk for the recycling.  I put the water on to boil, took a shower, and listened to the radio while I was making dinner.  It hadn’t started to rain, but when I let the dog out before going to bed there weren’t any stars visible.

This morning it was still dark and threatening, and a few sprinkles hit the windshield of the old man’s Ford on my way in to the post office.  Dennis went over to the shelves as soon as he saw me:  book or manuscript? he asked from the corner, trying to determine the size of the box. I buy a lot of very used books, and they come by Media Mail, which is extremely cheap though the time frame of delivery is pretty flexible. I told him what it was, and we were both a little surprised at the size of the box which, as it turned out, was mostly full of Styrofoam peanuts. 

Brian Hendrix is pretty much the only guy to go to for tech help if you’re a musician in central Florida, and that includes the ones who work the tourist hotel lounges and the kid-themed restaurants that have grown up around Disney World. In the grownup bars you’d better know every Eagles tune, and every Jimmy Buffett hit; in the kiddie palaces you’ve probably got a worked-out script that treads perilously close to the real guys—Raffi, or David Gonzalez—who have made it big enough to have agents and tour schedules. You’ll know songs about dolphins and monkeys and also more than a few of the tunes off the latest three or four Disney animation movies. You're putting on a happy face every night of the season, putting it on so hard it hurts at night to let yourself go. Off season, you've got repair projects piled up-- mixers with bad channels, processors missing their power sources, iffy cables-- and you'll be calling Brian to see what he's got and what he can order for you. Better do it now, while you've still got folding money left from the tip jar or the basket on the stage lip or the after-concert CD sales off the folding chair your girlfriend manned back when she still believed in you.

  If it weren’t for Disney World,the part of Florida  where Brian has his shop would be a wasteland, pockmarked here and there with sinking subdivisions and faded trailer parks populated by the old,  too poor or too gullible to head for the parts of the state that have something resembling topography, or scenery, or views.  There are shallow lakes where the ground has sunk a bit over a few million years, and there’s bass fishing; the Seminole tribe found excellent foraging before the speculative fevers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in Florida pushed them out.

It doesn’t get much different, there from here, though there’s a similar economy.  There are the tourists, here and there, and there are the locals, who try to eke out a living as symbiotes or parasites. The musicians, there and here, nurse old or cheap equipment, and Brian sends a fair quantity of tubes and transistors, toroidal transformers and the like up this way.

So I have the big case split in two, and I’m using a flashlight to illuminate the places where the press-on connectors go into the circuit board.  It’s dim, but since I rarely work out here at night, there aren’t any good lights to turn on. Throughout the year, I let the daylight determine my working life. In July I’ll be writing or practicing or thinking, staring at the screen and then out the window at the hayfield, till well after 8. There’s the break to ride, sometimes early, when it’s hot; sometimes late when Harry wants to push up Mohonk before it gets too close to the time when the landscapers race their trucks over the summit, pulling trailers with their zero-clearance mowers tied down provisionally rocking back and forth as they head too fast for the light and the blind curves.

In the winter, I start late and finish in the dark, sometimes the light of the monitor the only source. I have that flashlight I’m supposed to remember to bring back and forth, but often I forget it, and stumble down in the snow, negotiating the icy patches by moonlight. Like the animals, like most other people who are here year-round, winter is a time of longer sleep; the days are often marked by necessary bouts of hard labor in the cold. Sometimes I fall asleep on the couch out here, reading till the pages blur, and awaken, disoriented and disconcerted, very very late.

It’s supposed to be raining right now;  it was supposed to be raining this morning, and last night; and it’s supposed to rain tonight, and tomorrow, too. So I have set aside all the outdoor chores—painting the window wells of the old house, picking the riper blackberries before they fall to the ground from the sheer weight of the fruit on the slender boughs, thinning and moving, cutting the new storm door for the back house dutch door and fitting it. Harm has his hay-trailers out in the section he cut last week before the last bout of rain.  He complained to Harry that we’ve got too much standing water over in the next section, and he wants to wait another week or so to see if it will drain.

He’s not going to be happy if it rains hard and long, like it should. But it hasn’t yet. The clouds are black sprays beneath a veil of lighter grey torn here and there to show the blue.  Over on Mohonk Mountain, the lower layer moves swiftly, obscuring Skytop and the Bonticou Crag while, further along the ridge, the sunlit areas seem sharply greener by contrast.

We’ve got some time.  The rains are coming in from the west.  It’s a Canadian cold front, slow-moving, stalling sometimes and then picking up momentum again. We’ll probably know when to close the windows on the old house; the creek will start to rumble and rush as it fills from its headwaters just down from the Catskills, in the Vly. The front will hit the mountains, pushing over them, then fly down the other side and, where the cool air meets the warmer uplift from the valley it will drop its moisture in blinding sheets, and the smaller, narrower cuts will fill with rushing water.

The USGS map shows our creek in its drier, more permanent version, beginning where springs draw to the surface and even in the droughts the rocks are slick and shiny with moisture. But if you work your way above it, you can see that there’s another five or ten miles of dry wash, waiting for those sheets of water coming down the mountains in a roar that can overwhelm the county culverts and rip the blacktop off County Routes 213, 3, 4, even the wider and more barricaded 2, which runs into Catskill Park.

When the fronts come down like this, the creek unfurls up there, taking in waters that in slower times would go to the Esopus Creek further down. Stones roll, then the unstable rocks move, as the detritus from earlier storms rises and frees itself from the once-dry bed and tree limbs, rusted gas cans, parts of a fallen barn, and all the rest that was scraped from the mountain hollows in the hurricanes of last October start down toward us.

You can hear it coming.  First there’s the rush and burble of water rising rapidly up the banks.  If you’re outside, at the right angle to the amplifying wall of the barn, you’ll hear it, and head in to put the windows back in the old milking room that’s now full of guitars and computers and boxes of books and stacks of papers and photographs and old magazines. Or you’ll head down to the old house to close the windows up on the second floor, in the bedroom.

If you miss that first wave, you’ll more likely hear the second, a sort of muted, distant rumble under the sound of water.  Small stones are racing along the creek bottom, bouncing off the rocks that are already there, slapping against the  miniature pebble beach made in the big storm year before last. The wind will pick up, and pieces of the sycamore trees will break off and crash down onto still-hard, dry ground.

Then the susurration of the rain itself, bouncing off the leaves, changing to a higher-pitched hiss as it hits the roadway, and dropping an octave when it crosses the front yard and hits the metal roof J.C. and his crew put on last year.  If you’re upstairs, you’ll hear the individual punctures of drops growing more and more frenetic until they merge into a full roar.

I hope you remembered to put the windows up in the studio. I hope you closed the workshop door when you were putting the still-unpainted screens back in, before you got distracted by some thought, some phrase, some rhyme that might be teased into something if you moved obliquely toward it. I hope you put the vodka in the freezer and turned the big tube-amp off so it won’t burn hot and unattended, impatient with disuse, till the morning. Did I leave that book on the metal chair?  If so, I hope I can unstuck the pages when it dries out. Will I hear from her? Are the cats in? What will I cook, listening to the radio turned up louder than usual to overwhelm the steady wash of noise from the rain and the hollow drumming where the roofline extends past the gutter and the water hits the half-empty galvanized pail set by the door to make filling the bird feeders easy on the bad winter mornings when the cardinals flashed red against the snow.

Each season carries over into the next, and the next, leaving things behind: the snow shovel still in the storm-entrance to the cellar, the half-empty 50-pound bag of pasture seed shoved onto the workbench next to the spare racing pedals for the good bike. Leaves,  red and yellow, still brilliant, still stuck between the sheets of waxed paper, in the book you open. A note from her, next to the bed, left under the pillow as a gift, small consolation, the last time she and you rose in the dark and you made coffee while she prepared to leave again. The picture of a dog who died last year, or was it the year before, stuck into a  frame holding that photograph of the two of you in the doorway, both of you shielding your eyes from the brilliant summer light, the light that will come tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, when the front has pushed through and the last trailing remnants of raincloud and grey dawn are somewhere else, somewhere east of here. Now it is silent, almost still, only the tall grasses moving just a little, waiting for rain.

Stormy Weather

The report on Thursday showed rain through Saturday, as the cold front continued to move in from the Midwest, slow but steady.  By Sunday, it was due to be colder, much colder, with crystal clear skies through the week. The leaves would be at peak, and the leaf-peepers would be up from the city, crowding the roads as they headed from craft sale to self-picking apple orchard to pumpkin stand.

On Friday, the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., came by to pick up the Komatsu excavator.  Wayne Senior was edgy; he’d been waking up nights impatient for the rains to stop.  I got jobs waiting; not just yours, and I cain’t just sit around watching tv and waiting for something to change.  We got some stumps to pull out on that new house up top the hill—we can do that in the rain. Later that day, as it cleared off a bit, Ed came with the new propane tank that the Bushes were going to bury.  After he hooked it and swung it down from the truck and laid it by the Porta-Potty, we walked around a bit so he could recollect where we’d run the small propane line to the kitchen wall furnace a few years ago.  We didn’t find it, but the line seemed secure and gas was going to the unit, even if it wouldn’t light. The new one was on order and he was planning to come in on Wednesday while the Bushes were burying the tank and cutting the trench for the new line to the little house we were putting up off the back of the old house. He was planning to do the install and the hookup and the inspection all that one day so as not to have to twiddle his thumbs while the Bushes poured the sand and the rough stone.

Charles came over late that afternoon to talk about bringing in the herd to graze off the hayfield. It’s the last circuit of the year; they start here, and then cross the creek to Harry’s clover field, then work counterclockwise from meadow to meadow, as Charles and Francesca move the electric fencing along with them.  Land around here is way too expensive to make a go of a small herd; Charles sharecrops the cattle with seven or eight of us, moving his cattle around the hay-cutting schedules that differ from field to field depending on the fertility of the soil and the rainfall.

Mike and Clint looked at that extended weather report as well.  Mike said on Monday they’d start ripping off the old roof on the main house and get it decked so JC could bring his standing-seam crew in from Connecticut to do the whole roof-and-gutter job on the next dry spell. As of Sunday, there was a 10% chance of precipitation for five days out, pictures of sun with a cloud in front of it on weather.com and Accuweather both.

This morning I woke up to a steady rain, not too hard, not drenching, but enough to worry its way under the roofdeck and the tarps and drip down inside the house.  Everyone was off the roof except for Eric, who was looking for the spots where it came in, so as to save the insulation. The electric fence was on, but the cattle weren’t coming today. The Bushes weren’t going to do the propane tank and trench or dig the new graveled ditch to direct the spring floods from the ridge down to the creek.  Ed didn’t even bother to come by or call to say the hookup was off.  Mike came in to the kitchen to check to make sure Eric had caught the leak.

Last night, Harm left a message while I was out in the last light splitting firewood and watching Charles and Francesca lay the fencing.  I expect he was worried about his hay-rights again.  We don’t get anything out of the haying, and each cutting takes another percentage of the fertility of that soil.  He’s right to be worried.  We are looking for a better plan, pricing manure and talking to Paul up the ridge about having him plow the full 18 acres of hayfield under so we can plant a nutrient-restoring rotation for a couple of years.  This isn’t great soil to begin with—it’s clay-based, and it needs the composting of green that withers to brown around this time of the year.

Out in the field where he was surveying to set the electric fence, Charles talked to me about survival when you don’t have tourists or weekenders or contracting or landscaping jobs to sustain the year-round population.  Around here, the builders have split in two.  A few of the small crews have gone upscale—people like Will Wallace do trendy work for the ones who will always be rich no matter what the economy: geothermal heating units, three-acre duckponds surrounded by artfully arranged plantings that include full-size trees trucked in for $5,000 a tree and fed by drip-irrigation from the pond using solar-powered pumps.

The bigger crews are pretty much gone, now, bankrupt or shrunk to subsistence, to a couple of men with older pickup trucks and the woodworking equipment relocated to the basement of the house, the big compound with its hardwood kiln-dryer and cabinet shop and fixture showroom and sales office abandoned, the keys given back to the bank. Mike’s crew here is small. Dan was a children’s book illustrator.  Ethan is a kid, an apprentice who does the pickup and carries for Mike, setting up the scaffolds and working the compressor. Eric shows up in his van at 7 every day.  It’s a few years old, and it still has the signage from when he worked for himself.  Eric Rose Contracting, it says. Roofing Siding Painting Flooring. Like a lot of the guys who were doing ok before the bust, he keeps the company name, though he’s working for Mike now. Mike himself is 64; some days it’s just him on the job, because Clint has another job somewhere and it’s smarter to pull the crew for a few days than lose the work.

Charles has heard me talk about my son.  Taylor is something close to a freegan, a class of people, mostly young, who have rejected the economic system and vowed to live outside its cash-and-credit market.  Freegans live by barter and by exploiting the wastefulness of the dominant economy.  They don’t live on the land like the commune people of the old counterculture.  They’re urban, and usually well-educated. They majored in music, and literature, and philosophy, but also political science and economics and sociology.  Instead of moving into advertising, or video game orchestration or consumer-desire polling, they went to Americorps or Teach For America, where they were thrust into the bowels of American failure—places the comfortable and the conservative—their parents, often—can’t even admit exist.  On the West Side of Chicago where he ran the computer lab for a middle school that had consistently failed the No Child Left Behind criteria, Taylor heard from the kids that he was the first white man they’d ever talked to who wasn’t a cop or a social worker. On standardized testing day in the spring, the teachers at schools like that one look out at a classroom in which perhaps a quarter or a third of the students started the year there.  They’re being judged on the performance of pupils few of whom they’ve taught for more than a month.  The kids have cycled in and out of sometimes three schools in a year, as their families moved, or were evicted from place after place, or as they themselves were passed from relative to relative, foster home to foster home. It’s hard to be immersed in that world for even a few months and keep believing in a brighter, shinier America where freedoms are extolled and the heavy arm of government regulation is loosened so a new crop of bright and shiny entrepreneurs can lift the economy to new heights. 

Working at Americorps, Taylor started rooming with a group of musicians and computer hackers in a drug-dealer’s block at the edge of Humboldt Park, where rent was cheap and the three-flat was surrounded by vacant lots from burnouts dating back to the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Dave, and Aaron, and Taylor and the others had given the dining room over to rows of humming servers-- Macs and HP and Lenovo machines that ran day and night.  They were tied into a global network of open-source software programmers who were building apps that could run on crank-powered laptops linked to the internet via cellphone networks in places like Malawi and Somalia, Laos and Mongolia. Everybody did overflow-work to get by, living on the froth that cascades down the outside of  the craft-brewery glass poured for a financial analyst whose Audi is parked outside the tastefully rustic or factory-themed restaurant. 

I was thinking about your son, Charles said, as the last light was dying in the hayfield and the fences were set, their neon-blue cabling glowing over the green and brown grasses. You know, before I ran cattle, everyone I knew was a refugee from the city. The locals around here—they’re the ones I spend my time with now.  They’re used to living on the edge.  They’ve been living on the edge around here for generations.  The Schoonmaker’s down 209—you know them.  They’ve been here since 1650, and it’s never been safe. The locals—they worry about the weekenders and the city people; they can see that these are people who don’t know how to get by, don’t know what to do. I know what he means.  I’m returning to skills I grew up learning—woodworking, furniture repair, housepainting, plumbing. We’re looking for crops we can trade off with others, the way Charles trades the organic grass-fed freerange beef—beef whose organic grass freerange is our hayfield, and Harry’s and Paul and Sarah’s. 

We can look for niche-crops to drive down to the locavore slow-food restaurants that are all the trend in Brooklyn and Chelsea and the Lower East Side.  Taylor advises against it, and Charles is on his side.  They share a sense of doom, though from different angles.  Charles sees the fragility of that market and the system of faith that lies behind it. What do you do when all you’re harvesting is thyme and rosemary and heritage tomatoes, but there’s no banker-bonus epicure to support the restaurants that have been supporting you?  For Taylor, it’s more a matter of ethics admixed with radical politics.  He believes it’s wrong to participate in a morally bankrupt system.  No, not exactly.  It’s wrong to contribute to that system.  It’s right to participate by siphoning off its excesses to support the project of building the tools for a different system.

In the now-dark field, I stand by myself as Charles drives the muddy Toyota up Old King’s Highway, done for the night.  The stars are emerging, as the weather reports tell us they will emerge every night for days, after cloudless afternoons loud with the rattles of activity:  the setting of the propane tank, the buzz of the jigsaw, the pop of the pneumatic nailgun.  But I don’t think so. I am looking at the cloudless, starry night and waiting for signs of the storm.

Intimations of Disaster: Haying the Field

The field is half-hayed. Harm's tractors are parked where he quit at dusk; the little one pulls the tedder, while the big one does the cutting first, and then, after the tedding's done, pulls the bales and the haywagon behind that. Both of them are Farmalls, and both of them date to the late '40s or early '50s. The other equipment is that old or even older; the tedder looks to be a '30s or early '40s model.

Tedders aren't that common any more; they're the machines that flail the hay with their circular arms, spreading it across the field so it will dry more easily and the mold and mildew won't get into the bales. Small-time farmers still do it, and it's being pushed pretty hard by the state ag bureaus, too. Harm's dad has been at it for 70 years or so, and he's not about to change a routine that has served him well.

Yesterday it was 98 when I came out from the barn. Maureen was just back from Emanuel's and when she saw the old man running the tedder, in a flannel shirt and no hat, she ran to the spare fridge in the garage and brought him out a bottle of cold water. While we were waiting, he told me about the tractor. Good and small, he said, meaning both that it was pretty small, and that its smallness was good. About 15 horsepower; just right for the tedder-- couldn't pull the baler-- and you can pour a five-gallon can in her and she'll run a week, sometimes two. He was proud of that machine-- it wasn't as old as he, but it wasn't far off from that, either. Not as hot as I thought it was gonna be, he told Mo, thanking her for the water. I came out early 'cause it looked like it was gonna rain up by us.

Up by us. That's a phrase we didn't have along the coastline in Connecticut, where I grew up around boats and hurricanes and salt grass and the intense smell of the marshes at low tide, a smell that drove the summer people away, sometimes, they not having much experience with things that grow and decay and in their decaying, feed new growth. If you liked mussels, and clams, you were pretty much used to that smell, and the sting when you washed the mud off your feet after digging for them, and found you'd cut your heel pretty bad on something. Then you put some of that mud in the cut, and the bleeding would stop again.

Back there, our language was more about time than space, and when we talked space it was more about reach than rise. We talked about getting back before the tide shifts, or waiting for the flood before you pull the boat out.

Here, up by us and down by you means something. Unlike tidewater Connecticut, this land is up-and-down, and we are definitely down. We drain the ridge; Harm doesn't hay the bottom half of the field because it's too wet much of the time and even when it's not it's a rich collation of thistle, milkweed, Canada Lily, day lily, with some sawgrass mixed in just to guarantee that no livestock manager or horsefarm foreman will ever buy the bales off Harm, no matter how desperate the shortage or how low the price. Up at the top of the field, where the road is pocked with dead flattened chipmunks and squirrels, and we found the lone foreleg of a fawn, gnawed by coyotes, a couple of weeks ago, the hay is pretty good. But leaving the farm means you've got to go up, steeply, on any of the roads that boundary our property from Paul and Sara's, and from Harry and Sarah's. Harm hays up there first, holding us off till the last days of a long hot dry spell, when the grasses have the wet wrung out of them by the hot days and everyone wonders why the storms don't come, but they don't.

Harm doesn't keep the old Farmalls because he's some sort of collector of antique American farm machinery. You might think so from the cars that stop along Rest Plaus Road or King's Highway, often right in the middle of the road, while some weekender frames a cell phone picture of the old barn and the house set low, and the long expanse of hayfield with the tractors and the balers and the wagon parked up toward the top, where they make such a nice foreground for the shot that's going to go up on Facebook or flick'r in a little while, if the guy with the pale legs and the Izod shirt doesn't get clipped when Kurt Cross goes by in the truck, bringing the mini-Backhoe home from some building site.

Harm keeps the stuff because he got it cheap and, because it's so old, it's extremely simple to fix, and then to keep in good repair. In the '40s and '50s, this was prime dairy country, and every available field was dominated by pasture and hayfield. Now the milk comes from giant factory farms in the Midwest or the Central Valley or down in Mexico, where no one has to worry too much about regulators and pretty much anything can be labeled Organic and sold at the Safeway at a price so far from breakeven for a genuine organic dairy farm as to guarantee the death of an agricultural sector already reeling by the '60s. Most of the old barns up here have a tractor or two in them, unused for decades, and so you can pick one or two up for parts without too much trouble. Belts and hoses, the sort of things that die from age and not use-- those you can replace with aftermarket car parts, cut to adapt them to the tractor.

Harm isn't a full-time farmer. This is what he does when he gets off work, takes vacation time or switches shifts to get a block when the weather's hot and dry and the grasses are high and golden. He grew up in this; his father made a go of it, but just barely, all the way into the '70s. Most of the hay goes to the horse farms, and the boarding facilities for weekenders with pretensions to polo or English riding or steeplechase-- Virginia-bred women and men who went to the right schools and are now deep in the finance markets in New York City, for whom this area is as close as they can come to the places down there where their wealthy and privileged parents raised them on dance lessons and cotillion and the debutante coming-out rituals.

Harm hays with his shirt off-- I tell him he's crazy, hasn't he read about ozone layers and skin cancer? and he shrugs me off; I like it this way, he says. The tractors are slow and the rattle of the machinery behind them startles the flocks of smaller birds that seem to commute to whatever field Harm is haying that week, along with the turkey vultures who will appear a week later, snapping up the carcasses of the snakes and the few redwing blackbirds not quick enough to leave the nests as the mower bears down on them.

This year, though, the hawks aren't here-- or at least I haven't seen them yet. They used to ride the updraft where the hayfield meets the woodlot or the treeline along the road, diving down to take the voles and the field mice scampering in ill-directed panic from the machines.

Each year seems to carry its losses, if you're inclined to dwell on loss. Three years ago, sitting out in back of the house as the darkness loomed and the sky completed its slow melding with the ridge and the fields, just before the stars emerged to puncture the bowl of air, the bats would come out from the barn, scores of them, the whispering rustle of their wings just audible as they dipped and soared, clearing away the gnats and mosquitos. Now they are gone, casualties of an epidemic that decimated the bat population around here, and then spread across America. For the smaller organic farmers, this wasn't simply a matter for eco-nostalgia; those bats were essential to keeping pests at bay. That epidemic pushed out a lot of the smaller farmers, the ones who'd bought the dream while they were in college or afterward, when they walked the Appalachian Trail and talked the long talk with others like them, about what to do, and how to live. I don't know where they've gone since.

Last summer, it was the small fish in the creek. For years, we'd watched them darting in and out of the shadows, and then, suddenly, they weren't there any more. Once they left, so did the blue heron who had taken up residence in the wide spot where the creek cut back and forth before heading down to Harry's gristmill. Mornings, he was my first wakeup call, as he rose, his cry a groan of complaint, the sort you might make when you had to arise at 5am on a muggy summer morning. Now he's gone, as well.

This year, it's the albino hawk who is missing, and the two redtails who used to nest in the tall trees that ran the line between our place and Harry and Sarah's, their roots pushing the collapsed stone wall into ever-more complete disintegration. I could watch them as I read in the hot afternoons, or worked on a guitar part, sitting on the little rope-seat chair that had come down in Mo's family from the generation that left Germany and Poland at the turn of the last century to end up here, a little short for me, but good for my hand position when I was working on complex finger patterns and long reaches across the neck.

Everything's going. That's what it felt like. But the litany of losses is really just a matter of temperament. If you're gloomy, this is the hottest summer ever, and last winter the coldest and wettest and hardest, and the bats are gone and the small fish, and for all you know some blight has stricken the hawks. If you're dark enough, the chewed-up foreleg of the fawn is an intimation, an omen.

Last year, while we were looking for those small trout that weren't darting up and down the creek, we noticed instead the sudden explosions of mud in the stiller parts. One burst would sometimes stimulate an expanding row or even a field of underwater dust storms. The dog would stand right at the edge, quivering with excitement at this strange but endlessly entertaining sideshow.

The crayfish ranged in size from an inch to as much as four inches in length; mini-lobsters to my saltwater eyes; gigantic roaches to Maureen's grittier urban past. Where had they come from? They seemed some sort of invasive species, indications of a larger ecological shift that was killing off our treasured fellow-tenants on this land and air and water. These were Louisiana crayfish; bellwethers of the ominous trends of global warming and environmental depredation that would upend the country, leaving flood and drought, pestilence and famine.

Then, late last August, late in the afternoon, Georgie began her frenzied bark, the one that indicated someone was in the road. Usually it was Molly and the girls out from the brick house they rented from Harry, walking their little dog and pushing their doll-strollers. This time, though, it was a man, standing at the bridge, staring intently into the water below, his old Hyundai pulled all the way off the road in the ditch where the county mowers clear the weeds but leave the day lily patches. After a while, he came around the back of the house. He was a little strange, I thought, but I had been living alone here for a while, and knew most everyone around, and probably anyone not familiar but also not wearing a recognizable stereotype-- weekender, real-estate scout, Eurotourist -- would have looked a little suspicious.

I used to know the Pratt's, he said, without any introduction, as if that single statement made perfect sense. And it did. The Pratts owned this farm from the '40s to the '70s, when Mrs. Pratt died or went into the nursing home, and it began its cycle of owners till it came, finally, to rest with us. I was a kid; my father used to take me back here to the creek, he said. The Pratt's-- they didn't like crayfish. They let us net them. Oh, were they good, too. I offered him a seat but he didn't feel comfortable; he had something to request of me, but he wasn't sure it was right to do so. I asked him how old he was back then; ten, eleven, twelve; you know, just when that sort of thing really mattered, before it all changed. I knew what he meant. I remembered those years, before the fights began, and the dangerous wild adventures and the running-away, and the voice of my father raised in rage and impotence against me.

Tell me. He said. Do you think some time I could go back there for crayfish again? Would you mind it? If you want them, I'll give them to you. I just want to....

Of course, I said. Of course. I knew what he meant, what he was fishing for, what he was hoping he would net. And I wished it for him, too, just as I had wished it for myself, wished it till it brought me here, to the place where their ashes were now scattered, in the hayfield, and down by the creek, close to the places where the crayfish were, in a landscape they would have found familiar to them, even if there was no salt tang to the air.

I think he did come back, once or twice, maybe more. I'd pull into the driveway with the bag of groceries or the package from the post office, and I'd see a hint of his shirt down where the clearing of the hayfield just began to give way to the tall bramble. Once I thought I saw him wave, and once, though I'm not sure, I think I saw someone with him, a girl, maybe ten, maybe nine.

He's not come back this year; like the hawks and the heron, he has moved. But he gave us something in return. Now we know that the crayfish come and go; that the hawks will come and go; that, perhaps, even the bats will someday return to race across the deep blueblack of the last sky light.