Perfection of the Morning

by Sharon Butala

  I don’t go out every day with Peter to help him anymore. We agree that my writing is more important. I am no longer as curious as I once was, nor am I as young. He has responded to this, as most people in the business have to the lack of help, by mechanizing as far as possible. I sometimes regret this, but I know now that I would never be as content, even as happy, as some of my friends and neighbors seem to be checking pregnant heifers with a flashlight in the middle of the night, pulling calves, driving tractors, balers or combines, pickling and canning and freezing food and in the evening playing cards or making quilts or crocheting or knitting or just visiting. I envy those who find contentment in these things, because in them, it seems to me, there is a calm, a sense of peace and of the simple rightness of existence from which, for whatever reason, I have been forever barred. Nonetheless, through working with Peter all these years and sharing in the joys and the trials of this ranching life, I had been gathering another, deeper kind of understanding about rural life.

  The circumstances of our neighbors and acquaintances grew more and more critical and the talk everywhere—on the streets, on coffee row, at dances and family gatherings—grew more and more despairing. Loss was everywhere around me, fear, anger and an omnipresent, inexorable sadness at the destruction of a way of life several generations old and of the dream of the future that had proven to be unattainable. In the midst of the confusion and chaos and contradictory ideas going on around me, I tried to make sense out of the desperation of farm families to stay on their farms no matter what the price. I tried to see beyond the reasons they gave when asked: because they were too old to start a new life somewhere else, or because they knew how to do nothing else, or because they knew the virtual impossibility of finding work in towns or cities in the midst of a general recession, even beyond those who called on a moral right—this was my father’s and my grandfather’s place and nobody is putting me off it.

  Clearly there was more to this need to stay on the farm than what was being said, no matter how true these reasons were. The more I thought about it, the more I lived the life myself, the more it seemed to me that the roots of the profound sorrow and genuine desperation of farm people lay in something deeper than these things. Because I had finally come to know a life lived in Nature myself, I began to believe that, at root, the basic loss to farm people was greater even than a loss of livelihood or a familiar way of life, as hard as these things would be to endure. The greatest loss, it seemed to me, was the loss of constant contact with Nature and of all that implied.

  I didn’t believe the hopeful prophecies that salvation was just around the corner and that soon everything would go back to the way it had been in the late seventies. When I heard experts prophesy about even bigger and better technologies which would save us, I shuddered, since it seemed to me that it was technology run rampant that had brought on the disaster in the first place. When I heard about corporate farms I saw only a modern-day feudal system where people would work the land for the profit of landowners whose faces they would never even see. When I heard about any ideas for saving the place which involved moving people off their farms, I saw only unlivable, dangerous megalopolis full of the poor and homeless—and an empty landscape.

  North America, obsessed with the notion of progress and the technological means to achieve it, and increasingly urbanized, has failed to make a place for people on the land. Thousands of people, rural for generations, have been driven off it. We have raped our natural resources and despoiled them, overused pesticides, insecticides, chemical fertilizers and huge machinery to subdue Nature, and devalued the rural person and his/her way of life along with rural culture.

  It seems to me unavoidably true that the plight of the farmers is directly related to the question of our need as a species to come back to Nature. If we abandon farms and farmers as we have known them for the last ten thousand years, we abandon our best hope for redefining ourselves as children of Nature and for reclaiming our lost souls, for what other sizable body of people exists in North America with their knowledge? There are only Native people left who have been speaking to deaf ears since their conquest from five hundred to a hundred years ago. We may at last be ready to listen to them, but the cultural differences—in particular, religion—make it difficult for many non-Natives to hear what Natives are saying. Increasingly we know in our hearts they are right, have been right all along, but we can’t seem to find a way of implementing their knowledge, of blending it with our own beliefs into a workable salvation both for the land and for all of us as a species.

  At the simplest level is the fact that all the values we cherish and that we consider to be the basis of our culture as a whole, and that provide for its continuity but that are difficult to keep alive in cities, live on in the country: tightly knit extended families and small communities, where the loss of any one member leaves a gap but where deviance is tolerated and doesn’t mean a life on the streets, where interdependence is clear and cooperation thus a way of life, but without destroying self-reliance essential for survival in a sparsely populated countryside and in a harsh climate.

  Country people understand how the world was built; it didn’t appear whole and shiny the morning they were born; their fathers and mothers built it step-by-step each day. With only the most fragile and minimal of support systems rural people have learned to do everything for themselves: to build roads and houses and machinery and to grow crops to feed thousands as well as their own families. Even more precisely, each individual farmer knows his acres of land intimately, knows the weather patterns over it, knows what grows best where and why, and he knows intimately what the minute variations in the color of his crop or the way it stands mean and what he must do to rectify problems. No society can afford to wipe out the whole class of people in whom the practical knowledge laboriously passed down by generations remains alive.

  Though we can’t all live on the land, we have to keep a substantial proportion of us on it in order to reestablish and maintain our connection with Nature. Further, these people have to live on the land for a long time, they need a lot of time to come into tune with it, and to do so it is vital that they not be driven only by the need to feed their families and themselves, which always results in their disregarding what they know very well about the needs of the land, and to overwork it or overstock it with animals, or to plow up marginal land—that is, to exploit Nature instead of nurturing her.

  It is unbelievable to me that futurists and experts at universities and in government don’t see how important it is to all of us that a stable body of people remain in intimate touch with the land, and include it in their equations about the future. So far there has been no concerted effort that I know of by governments at any level to address the issue of rural depopulation in a creative way. Any efforts have so far been based on the unexamined belief that rural life and farming or ranching must be synonymous. As long as we pursue reasoning from this narrow foundation, given current market conditions and the prospect of more and more countries becoming self-sufficient or exporters of food, we are unlikely ever to find a solution that allows for a considerable, stable body of rural people.

  Years ago an old man who had farmed and raised cattle on this land all his life, when we were speculating about the future for people out here given financial disaster and rapid depopulation, remarked that he thought one day there would be people on every quarter again as it had been during his childhood. I asked him how he thought this would come about. He had no answer, not conceiving of a mechanism that would produce this result, but when I asked he looked not at me but into the distance and repeated his belief. I couldn’t forget what he’d said, because it seemed so clearly a visionary moment to me, beyond reason, beyond the facts. I thought he had seen something that was more than a dream, even if he had no logic with which to defend it.

  Ideas for a new life out here are beginning to be heard: small, highly specific farms, medium-sized farms with a high rate of diver-sification, a buffalo commons
with no farms at all, advanced, amazing new technology doing what we can’t imagine, on enormous tracts of land, partnerships between urban families and farm families to produce food for a specific, small population, and numerous other vague and mostly unsatisfactory notions.

  Much of this land, that which should never have been broken because of its marginal agricultural value, needs to be put back into grass and to do so will require money, time and a love of grasslands for themselves. Because of the extreme fragility of this landscape, any such project would require many years, probably more than one lifetime. I have no doubt that there are many people, from former farmers driven off their land to people aching to get out of the city, who would be overjoyed, if given a salary, good advice and equipment, to move onto quarter or half sections in need of reseeding and/or nurturing and to devote their lives to this project as stewards of the land.

  I don’t think the repopulation of the Great Plains will be easy, nor do I claim to have a clear notion of how to do it. But any such repopulation has to be based on a belief in what I have been saying, that in a renewed relationship with Nature as a people, and in a flourishing rural life, lies the salvation and the foundation of our nation. First we have to begin with the vision and with the desire; we do not lack the wit to bring it about; what we require is leadership.

  Most environmentalists tend to be urban, and as Neil Evernden has shown in The Natural Alien, the only way they have known how to fight the corporate world and governments has been to put Nature in their terms, as manageable, sustainable resources, withholding the designation of value of another kind—its innate value—as the primary issue. This seems to me the same kind of mistake farmers made when they asked to be taken seriously by urban people by saying that farming was a business like any other business and that farm life was just like city life, except that it took place outside of cities. Those who genuinely saw it (as distinct from those who merely paid lip service to the idea), as such destroyed it. Farm life is overwhelmingly unlike city life in most ways, despite the presence of microwave ovens, dishwashers, and even the occasional swimming pool by farmhouses. True family farming has never been a business like any other business and ought never to be seen as such. What is best in farming and farm life is that it takes place, day in and day out, in the bosom of Nature.

  I think of that old man’s vision of a countryside dotted with houses and houses filled with families, children in small country schools, churches filled again on Sundays, weekend dances and entertainments, well-traveled roads, a vibrant, living culture flourishing far from cities. In his vision he sees this place as it was sixty or seventy years ago; I see it too, but I see a people with a different ethic than those of his childhood had.

  I see them less poverty-stricken, less driven by the simple need for survival. I see them as aware of themselves as vital to the human community in providing the direct link to Nature our species must maintain. I see them as the preservers of a body of knowledge thousands of years old, as caretakers, stewards of the land, and maybe even, in a much better world than this one, as the wise men and women to whom others will turn for guidance and healing.

  My mother’s golden memories of life on the farm, where she had lived till she was fourteen when her father lost it to drought and my father’s lifelong but hopeless dream of going back to the farm, neither of which I had paid much attention to when I was growing up, came back to me now. Now I saw that this was where I had come from; these were my people, too, whether they accepted me or not, whether I felt fully at home among them or not.

  I began to feel with the immediacy of a blow to the stomach, not only what all of us would lose, but more particularly what I would lose if Peter fell victim to the crisis too. Every blade of grass, every trill from a red-winged blackbird, every sparkle of sun on the Frenchman River that trickled past our house at the hay farm seemed more precious. It seemed I had discovered a good place, a good life, just in time to lose it.

  In the city for short visits now I studied people’s houses, or the rows of condominiums or the new apartment buildings, assessing how close they were to each other, how big their yards were, what their occupants had for views, trying to imagine how I would live again in the city and what arrangement might be acceptable should something happen to Peter, or to the ranch. At home walking in the hills or down narrow country roads, I tried to imagine life without this space, this welcome, close presence of grass and sky. My dream of the blossoming twig took on new meaning. For without my realizing it, instead of being unable to imagine spending the rest of my life in the country, I found to my surprise that now I couldn’t imagine how I might survive if I had to leave it to go back to the city to live.

  THE PERFECTION OF THE MORNING

  On a wet, cold Sunday morning in late August, after I had spent a sleepless night tossing and turning, my head was buzzing with a confusing and confused jumble of words, ideas, memories and fragments of dreams I was too tired to put a stop to. It was a nasty morning, I was tired and out of sorts, but the dog counts on a morning run. I couldn’t work, and I felt propelled to go out for other reasons which, because of my confusion and dis-ease, my altered state of consciousness, I didn’t even try to isolate and clarify. In fact, I was so muddled and mentally out of control that I didn’t even realize I was. I put on my jacket and, my dog at my side, went out.

  It was as if I were being driven by some force I couldn’t see or feel, but that pushed me to go quickly—I was almost running—that had taken over my brain so that I wasn’t thinking rationally—I wasn’t thinking at all—my head was simply buzzing but nothing connected to anything else and I couldn’t hold on to any thought for more than the instant it took to register before it was gone again. I reached the edge of my favorite field, put one leg cleanly down a hidden badger hole to just below my knee and fell hard facedown in the grass. Not like this, came into my head. I picked myself up, half-expecting to find my leg was broken. I pulled up my pant leg; not only was it not broken, there wasn’t a mark on it, and there was no pain; instead it felt hot, burning, where the flesh and bone had struck the edge of the hole the hardest. I kept on walking, going slower now, and with the frightening buzz in my brain erased. I was calmer.

  Eventually I reached a small pile of rocks at a high point with a spectacular view of the countryside. It is a long, steep climb to that point, and I had not consciously chosen to go there, having had no destination in mind at any point, not even noticing where I was going. As I approached the stones, I began to feel increasingly disturbed, increasingly upset, and I had begun to go over all the possible reasons why I might feel so distressed, but there was no reason I could isolate. Yet the closer I came to the pile of stones the worse I felt. By the time I reached it the sky had closed in and it had begun to rain.

  I had thought the rocks at that spot were a pile until that morning, when I realized they were actually a circle. I stepped inside the ring and knelt down and began to turn over the small stones lying loose there, to see if any of them were points. As I did this, my feeling of unease grew so strong that I actually began to cry and when I couldn’t bear this anguish any longer—it kept growing and I stubbornly tried to ignore it—I jumped up, leaped out of the circle and ran a few steps down the nearby draw. But already I had begun a one-sided dialogue in my head, as if some part of me knew it was dealing with the supernatural, no matter how much the rest of me resisted, as to why I was being made to feel so terrible.

  Because you are not worthy—these words popped soundlessly into my head. Angrily, still resisting with all my might whatever was happening, I asked, Why not? Because I’m not Native? Because I’m a woman? Because I haven’t first purified myself by fasting and prayer? I stopped and stood to look back at the circle, and then I saw in my mind’s eye a shaman in full dress—a long robe, I think, a feathered headdress—standing in the circle, facing out over the landscape, arms raised in an attitude of prayer or invocation. I knew then I had trespassed on what had been a sacred site.
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br />   It was at least a month before I dared go back there again, and when I did I took a passing folklorist with me. First, I told him about my experience; he showed not a trace of skepticism; I described the circle of stones as I remembered them: all a beautiful rosy pink granite, a perfect circle with a flat beige rock embedded in the earth in the center. We climbed to the high point and at first I couldn’t find the circle! Then I went closer to what I thought was just a pile of rocks and there in the center was the flat beige rock I remembered clearly from that moment of scrabbling on my hands and knees at it, and the small stones scattered on it.

  The circle was irregular, partly scattered by weather and animals, and the rocks were either not pink granite (although most of them were as nearly as I could tell), or were so covered with lichen I had to search them for bare spots to see what kind and color of rocks they were. I was shaken.

  But something I had read in Jung kept tugging at my memory, and, back at the house, as sometimes happens to bookish people, when I took down Jung’s autobiographical volume Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it opened to the section I was looking for. In it, Jung told of an experience he had in Ravenna visiting the tomb of Galla Placidia (the mother of Valentinian III, the Western Roman Emperor, for whom she ruled until he came of age, and who died in 450 A.D.), which he says was “among the most curious events in my life.”