Wide Days
By Chila Woychik
“The wide days split life open like an ax.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The air feels different, heavy of wars and rumors of wars. And the air smells different, scents of an evening sun dusking far too early. Yet the corn still springs ready, and the soybeans spread their leaves, spreading, spreading.
~ 1 ~
This land is old. This ground has seen a thousand plows, a billion seeds. Each day is a living, each moment, rebirth. My gentleman farmer and I live on a large bump that gets windswept. It carries sound across fields, and backs of standing cattle.
Sixty-eight and still befuddled. Do forks go on the left hand or the right? Are engine size and horsepower the same thing? Most importantly, where did I put my phone?
And then there are the cattle and sheep breeds, the newest makes of vehicles, whether or not a skink is a lizard or a separate thing in itself, and heaven. Good heavens.
I know about cattle: a bull is tough and ballsy while a steer’s back legs glide with less friction between them. A heifer is a female who has never calved, and a cow has had at least one calf. Then there’s a springing heifer which means she’s been inseminated and will within nine months give birth to a calf. Either gender of young cattle is a calf. But beyond that, beyond the genders, into the specific breeds and hues and temperaments, I’m a mere promise, a possibility, in the realm of knowledge.
~
The man at the farm store bends down to heft bags of feed from a pallet into the back of my truck. The crown of his head is crisscrossed with cuts and dried blood. “Did you hit your head?” I ask.
“A bull stepped out in front of my truck two nights ago, and I rolled it while trying to avoid him. I’m probably lucky to be alive.”
This isn’t an odd occurrence here. A dead cow lay in a ditch recently, likely hit by a car at night, or day; given these rolling hills and many curves, it’s hard to say. Once, at eight months pregnant, feed bucket in hand, I was cornered by a hungry bull while caring for a couple’s small farmstead. Thereafter, I fed it quickly from a distance, then slipped into safety.
In Michigan we visited friends of friends for a brief few moments, to see their tractor, to see the animals. Their potbellied pig (I forget its name) was charcoal-gray, thick-skinned, and dirigible-shaped with bristly hair, stubby legs and a rubbery nose, but the beast grew soft under my hand on its back. My farmer would have offhandedly asked, “Which breed of pig was it? Duroc? Hampshire? Yorkshire?” “Potbellied,” I would have replied, if he had asked.
Neighbors bear their blue recycling bins to these dusty curbs, their arms outstretched to placate the angry god of Environmentalism while demonstrating the modernity of Hicksville, USA. We used to separate the bottles and cans and cardboard, too. Then we saw the trash collector dump those blue bins in with the rest of the garbage. But we don’t get to be upset; we all have jobs to do. It helps to keep moving, light shining brightly like we know what we’re doing, like nothing really matters but good intentions. Basically, we hope the bad days and the good days balance out over time, these wide days.
~ 2 ~
The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.
Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone
Deer straggle across the grain-stripped fields at dusk, hover along tree lines during daylight hours, fawns with soft tawny hides and long pretty lashes. They say the Midwest oozes, but to me it lives, and bandages my sore places. Yet sometimes I think I’ve stayed too long here. Each new thought begins with corn and ends with soybeans. A new view never shows but at the expense of a trip away. Oceans are fine, mountains speak, and every cliff leads to heaven. The time comes, though, when what really matters is solitude, a warm friendly body to commune with, and trips to town for coffee. Everything else lacks the nuance necessary for stand-up living.
Slide Occam’s razor across the crust of rural; carve out a place for cattle. Separate river from bank or skim off the too-high hill home to a brood of eaglets in a forty-foot oak tree. Simple, isn’t it? Once or twice I walked a field because it was there. I’m a field-walker when there’s this much land under my feet; it’s there for a reason.
Deer, I told someone once, should not be wild. On a leash they would need only patches of grass to nibble on while walking their owners, and they’d leave only small pebbles behind for their gratitude, good fertilizer for an aching earth. It would be the perfect pairing.
But deer have no sense of speed, no still points on the horizon. At a nearby quarry, they’ve installed eight-foot-high fences to keep deer from hopping over and into the pit while at full gallop. Workers say that before the fences were constructed, they’d routinely find dead deer laying at quarry’s bottom from the night before. Their depth perception is abysmal, and their visual acuity about 80% less than that of a human. They spot movement but not specifics, and can see better than we can at dawn and dusk, but they still can’t outrun a car. No wonder they jump out when we least expect it.
~
We, like blown glass, are fragile, and blink or breathe, life doesn’t wait. But let’s not underestimate the element of surprise along the way.
At the center of nature lies surprise. Sit long enough in one wooded space, one field, at one riverside, and watch, listen – everything changes. The white-butted Bighorn Sheep is expert at lazing under Arizona scrub brush then jumping out and away when you hike nearby. Ask me.
“Boredom” doesn’t exist in the dictionary of rural. Even in dry, intractable Arizona, or other areas of challenging geography, to the observant there is mystery and wonder.
Frogs, birds, moles, and pocket gophers. Snakes and lizards. Spider webs stretch across branches and shrubs, and buzzing insects abound. This is their land, after all, and I am the intruder. I adjust to weave between too close vegetation, and step over large, exposed, tree roots. When a tree falls across the path, depending on its size, I either crawl under it or climb over it. Skid marks in the wet soil indicate that a human or an animal has slid down these hills after a rain.
It’s windy here, and the coolness and browning grass trick me into thinking it’s September, or maybe even October. A vulture drifts above the tree line and across an open field, its finger-like wingtips ruddering the currents. Lift, drop, repeat. It wobbles like a ship on choppy water, steadies itself, turns. I think it enjoys the process. It’s in search of carrion, a dead squirrel or rabbit on the side of the road, or a too-old chicken who finally laid her last egg.
But for the sound of an occasional passing car, I might believe paradise exists outside my window of a morning—the birdsong, the birds, the song. And at night, I linger near the abyss where the coyotes’ long mournful wails signify a darkness too permanent for even me.
Unless the birds are gone, they’ll sing. Above the fan’s drone, beyond the rare vehicle kicking up dust, they’ll break each night’s ending and erect the morning’s newest moments. And I can say with certainty that the early bird makes the most noise.
But we’re here for the sunsets long before the birdsong, long before the clothes on the line spell “peace,” those dancing sleeves. You know. We see with open eyes.
~ 3 ~
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Karen Blixen
The clay bowl of the peace pipe is woman, and the stem is man. The Sacred Pipe is divine, the smoke that rises is divine. The unworthy bearer will suffer misfortune. Hear the old Cherokee myth.
There’s a Garden story, too, a woman slapping hide against rock, slap slap slap. Once, twice, a million times, she slaps it. Man watches with puffed chest and mountain-high stance, watches her slap it, slap slap slap. She dips it in water, for the fur won’t mind—beaver, bear, dire wolf; she’ll match it to her eyes, and smile.
The story stretches on, that incredible gap, a waiting for something new. Love that fizzles to duty is no love at all, but a slithering pretense, a cold-blooded charade. So he’ll find her, and apologize, and bring her apple blossoms, once, twice, a million times. He’ll rub that hide she’s beating against the rock, tell her she carries the scent of an impossible orchard, sweet and deceptive. He’ll take a bite, and then another, ’til she stands an empty core.
~ 4 ~
The simple hearth of the small farm is the true center of our universe.
Masanobu Fukuoka
What is a farm but a mute gospel?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The herd of elephants in the room? We see every last one of them, but if the omnivores among us want steak or chicken with their dinner, do let us take to the farm one last time.
Near-Spring has muddied up the fields, thawed rivers and streams. There’s no call for today’s expected 67-degree weather, and where’s the snow? All this melting; please tell me no one’s to blame and I won’t believe you.
Midwest, the land of green and brown and so much corn. Midwest, families and churches, tractors and trucks. Midwest, a land grown heavy with chemicals, and waterways that groan under the weight of runoff, water that will take “hundreds, potentially thousands of years to reach its goal to cut by 45% the nutrients that contribute to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone” (Donnelle Eller, Des Moines Register, July 17, 2019). Even spray drift happens, and we breathe it in. What used to be the healthy Midwest has become a breeding ground for sickness. All this beautiful land, but where goes the wisdom?
~
My gentleman farmer strokes the edges of invention for every glad new thing: Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics, which he calls tools in the outworking of his shiny brilliance. All I know is the warmth I feel when he points to a plane in the sky and with veiled pride says, “I have technology in that flight deck.” See, corn in his ears, hay in his shirt, but the scarecrow has a brain.
I shush my farmer as his pitch and volume swell like soybeans in humid weather. “They all talk loud,” he tells me after getting off the phone with an even older farmer down the road. “We get excited.”
~
At nearly six feet tall, I fold up to get into my vintage off-road vehicle. This old CJ5’s short wheelbase and tight suspension forces the driver to adapt, but when the doors and top are removed, the windshield laid down, the hubs locked out, well, adaptation isn’t much to ask. Jeep along a “Level B Maintenance” backroad deeply rutted and built for tractors, and you won’t mind folding. Creep up a stark narrow logging road that you’ll have to back down because the drop off on either side is too steep and there’s no place to turn around, and if you don’t remember it for the rest of your life, I’ll be a field of desiccated wheat.
Sauerkraut, those leftover field stalks. Drunk cows don’t stagger. The ensilage process takes about two weeks, and bovines fawn over the fermented mash. Nothing goes to waste this way. If you ever see a smiling cow, this is why. Should it surprise us that green fodder was first ensiled in Germany?
River ice softens on this Midwestern day. Fishing shanties are back in garages, home for the warmth, and a shaft of fresh color etches the tree line. There’s a red bow somewhere, and a present of love. We don’t analyze the pink and blue bow of sky, the moon set so; we stroke its belly, stroke, stroke, stroke.
When you’re in West Union, Iowa, a radio station from Rochester, Minnesota blares the latest contemporary songs, lines beyond the country crooning of most stations in this signal-weak area. It’s a singular change in a land of good-gracious green spreads of near-ready fields, and hills and curves incessant.
But let’s not over-sensationalize country living. Sure, rural is a nice place for a chat. Yet in the minds of some, people are only sent here for their sins. It’s a green hell, they say, without a chance for gold. The green of landscape and machines. The green of provincialism and a tinge of old strung through every new idea. It’s this fearsome Heartland Version of Neighborhood Watch that erects an invisible sign in front house windows pointing firmly to the past. Yet a cord attached to a comfort zone breaks as easily as one carrying an impossible load.
I had moved twenty-seven large round bales of alfalfa hay with our John Deere tractor. Then I speared one and transported it the three miles home. A widowed neighbor followed behind with her hazard lights on because a slow-moving vehicle slogging over hills and around curves is a hazard. Accidents happen on roads like these. But it’s my nature to take chances these days, to not be ashamed of my learned bucolic boldness. I straddle a tractor seat like an alpha leading the pack, a Wonder Woman of the Pastoral Plains.
~
You’ll never find a dog walking the ridge pole of a barn. That’s the place for pygmy goats and bold cats, even in winter. Sissy and Nanny hop along the extensive peak with ease, then run to the roof’s edge and bleat for us to catch them, rough hooves and all.
I hear my dad’s voice, the rise in pitch, when I use some expressions, and my mom’s when I draw-out certain words or form my mouth in that German sort of way. I’m my parents’ child through and through, in so much of what I do. Grew up in a flurry of hecticity, cleaning this, organizing that. Wake early, child, for early to bed, early to rise.
Some say rural is colorless and bland. I say these field greens and sky blues are the stuff of legend, or at least a merry heart, even when the sky is dark and the days disquieting. And in the end, rice and beans are good enough for me.
“But what have I done?” my farmer asks. Done? You’ve planted, grown, and harvested. You’ve lived a life of meaning. You’ve nurtured humor and a thousand lessons or so. Conceptualized, engineered, patented. Without flattery, I tell him how smart he is. How tall. How silly with that old man’s walk meant to draw attention (as he always does). Is it flattery he seeks? “Not what I meant,” he says. “What have I done with my shoes?”
~ 5 ~
How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?
Dr. Seuss
I am not deep. My light wavers in the presence of brainy owls. What flies amid a long blue space, frankly, leaves me cold, and new theories pour thickly. Once I fell through an inner tube float while going down rapids—my mad rush toward death. In times like that, no one thinks about new theories, or even old ones; the taste on the tongue is all that matters.
~
Say what you have to say, for the time for saying it grows mealy. Say it hard, softly, well, poorly. Say it while making love, while making pie, while making good on what’s left of your words.
I spend some hours of my fleeting life watching news, reading news, listening. Religionists can be evil. Humankind can be kind. This is much to take in, even more to give out in the pursuit of brass tacks. Gray summer days are incidental here. The sun perches somewhere quieter (is any place quieter than a cornfield?). A noisy wren slips in and out of its house hung from a tree, its song a mix of pink and grating.
The tall and narrow Fraser Fir fit perfectly into the small space I allotted it. First wrapped in Christmas lights, next the small blue ornaments, each shaped like a ball or star or something similar, and then the silver icicles. I keep it simple. Elegant. Son said he would help me. “I like it, Mom, but your star is crooked.”
“My star, it seems, has always been crooked,” I told him, though I didn’t realize just how crooked until these past few years. So much has come to light. Truths I would have never believed if proof had not shown up before my DNA-site weary eyes. The stories are long and tangled, much like the light strands now wadded up and packed away until next year.
This year, I was waiting for a Christmas long passed, a topography of childhood, both parents smiling on as we ripped open presents so carefully wrapped and hidden weeks before. I was waiting for a miracle of childhood when cares were “adult things,” when there weren’t the likes of heritage secrets, and no one ever died. I was waiting for a memory materialized, no sickness or pain, and a long walk with a familiar body beside me, instead of wheels on a chair I had to push in front of me. I was waiting for the remembrance of not knowing life in its shitty fullest.
The quick sick-and-go of lasting night, or the long-drawn-out decline, a sun sinking in slow motion. Faces gone, and tickings from a clock. Tie up loose ends. Is this what death is like? The body breaks down. The days, minutes spun tightly, and me the drying leaf in the wind of Time. All I’m saying is that if you have a time machine, I’d sure like to borrow it.
In the pale light of morning, a call goes out between heaven and earth, a sort of diamond-studded summons for all things created to reveal themselves again. There it lies at our feet, this day, this gift, in the spirit of obeisance. Maybe Providence is apologizing for the inadequate world he’s plopped us into, presumably to sink or swim. Or maybe the day simply speaks for itself in strains too soft for the hurried ear and too gentle for the overburdened heart, in sighs fresh and virginal like a newly sprung crocus or a kitten whose eyes have yet to open.
~
Age caught her on the wall between Jefferson Airplane and death. Time plays its hand; her tell is a flinch in strength, and dullness of reason. History is not a still life, Judith Kitchen said, but a coincidence of latitude. We fall into rabbit holes again and again, lack love when we need it, want it, bear an everlasting weight of weights. So ask for time like a gift because every breeze brings something new, and the taste on the tongue is all that matters.
~ 6 ~
In Conclusion
Should we begin from the way-back before reasonableness and time taught us better? Or maybe in medias res – in the midst of action and adventure so characteristic of a disappearing youth? Sometimes it’s best to start at the end when wisdom and age has etched lines around the mouth and eyes, and the heart is heavy with too many days.
I think it’s best to start at the beginning. The very front of it all. Where the dot meets the line.
A day is pure, waif-like, wandering. With no place to call home, it lays its head on hill and hollow, drags its pillow along its path.
When the mind is finally cloudy with years, and the eyes grow dim in the dim morning light, what will we see when we look out our window? Wars and rumors of wars? A blighted earth, a fallen star?
Time is a softener of harsh memories and unripe dreams. For a day is a breath, and no more. A breath, a breath, and no more. A day is a single solitary ten-cent breath. So when do we decide to fight the good fight, regardless of the lack of a cheering section? We can shine a light on the darkest days, if we try, a light on these wild, wide, days.
END
Author Bio: Chila Woychik is originally from the beautiful land of Bavaria, but has lived in the Midwest most of her life. She is widely published, and has an essay collection, “Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology” (Shanti Arts, 2020).