THE FIELD

"From the rise he looks out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world--it contains everything there is to know or possess--yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there is--just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple they are almost impossible to grasp.” Bobbie Ann Mason in “Spence and Lila.”

Jolie sent me this writing with a note that said, “Pa, this passage reminded me of you.” For years now, it’s been taped above my work station to remind me of the important things. Things like family, sense-of-place, connections. Longevity.

The back field on the hillside is grown high with wildflowers and hay. This morning the dew has me soaked to the hips as I hike to the top of our line where the old growth oaks describe the border. Deer have laid in the tall grass. I crawl onto one of the matted areas and feel the warmth of the ground. There’s the aroma of hay. It’s not dewy here so I assume this bed has not long been abandoned. There are three more beds; a family group, denizens of these acres recently grazing this meadow in the moonlight free from the heat of day and the deerflies.

I’m reminded of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Distant Thunder”: His wife Betsy lies asleep in a field after picking berries. Nearby lies the family dog, alert to a far-off storm. The fields of summer, ripe with strawberries, daisies and wispy tall grasses are, for me as well, a comforting place to be.

I’ve known these hilly meadows for half a century plus a few years. Before then they were farm fields planted with crops--late nineteenth to early twentieth century horse-tilled land, treeless except for the hedgerows along the drainages. The tack from those horses still hang in the barn we use now as our residence. I’ve seen the alders and the aspens and the white pines, along with the hardwoods, reclaim parts of these fields through the years, and have been witness to how the earth regenerates itself. It’s taken fifty years; the change in the landscape has been transformative, reverting back to a semblance of the way it must have looked before the settlers arrived and began clearing the trees.

I’ve hiked, hunted, skied, and bush-hogged these fields. I first waded through their tall grasses as an adolescent. Later on, with my young son and daughter and later still with seven grandkids. These grasses have known the stomping of familiar feet for quite a while. And I wonder: What is it about a piece of turf that makes it so special? What is it that inspires a man to literally hug the earth as I found myself doing this morning?

My father called this “God’s country.” This, coming from a man who shunned church-going; preferring, I suppose, to find his religion where he could be witness to the Divine in Nature right there at his feet, free from the interpretations and scolding of men in cloth. Bobby, my Dad, would deny any kind of affiliation with the formality of organized religion, although he was baptized as a Lutheran and celebrated Communion as a young man. The land---nature---was his religion and his church. Accompanying him countless times throughout my life, I was aware of the happiness he felt and the lightness of his step when hiking these fields. Like many a twentieth century man, he was not always happy and often carried a heavy load. Here was a place of respite, quietude, wildlife, earthiness, open skies and the vista of rolling hills unobstructed by and free from the litter of new-age contraptions. Here, one could easily become a believer in the awesomeness of the sublime if there was ever any doubt.

The soil of these fields once nurtured potatoes and grain. Belgian horses pulled the plow and the hay rake. As they worked, they contributed to the fertilization of the soil. Now it’s the deer and the bears and the countless furbearers, including seven dogs I have known, that wander through fertilizing, if you will, as they go. The crops are gone, but the hay and the wildflowers and the trees continue to flourish. There is fertilization and pollination taking place multi-fold; the nurturing of all things floral and faunal. And one could say, a nurturing of one’s spirit as well.

I stand in the middle of the meadow and listen to the drone of the insects; the bees, crickets and myriad others. The deer flies have found me and buzz around my head. I follow the  tractor path I made the other day when collecting some firewood. The tractor, a fifty six year old Ford Workmaster, has been called “Henry” since the day I bought it fifteen years ago; a term of endearment popular with the grandkids and used in addressing it (him) as if he were a longstanding family pet.

It seems not that long ago but it was, in fact, eleven years ago that Emma and I rode Henry about this field one November afternoon. I recall that it proceeded one of those bump-in-the-road experiences of life which left me somewhat drained spiritually. Emma, our first grandchild, was five and visiting us for a weekend. She decided it would be a good idea to take Henry “back in the field for a picnic.” Never mind that it was blustery and cold. Yet, the sun was shining, at least part of the time, so I grabbed a blanket and we started out with a picnic bag of essentials: cookies and Ovaltine. Emma said, “We can eat cookies just as good with mittens on, right ‘Bompa’?”

We drove slowly down the hill, across the brook and up through the woods trail to the open meadow, Emma chattering the whole way. We meandered around the field where I let Emma steer at will, up to the hilltop where we could look across at the house with the smoke wafting from the chimney, then downhill to the grove of pines. We stopped close to them in the tall grass and spread the blanket atop the matted indentations where three deer had bedded the night before. Sheltered from the wind, we broke out the peanut butter cookies and the Ovaltine and, while we picnicked, Emma used the binoculars to closely inspect the scudding clouds.

With Emma snug against me, resting her head upon my chest, teaching me the finer points of cloud observation and explaining to me how the field mice will come along to eat the crumbs after we leave, I was filled with the pleasure of the moment and moved by the beauty of her laughing face. I secretly wished that we could stay the way we were and not change, that she would always think of me as she does now. Then she said something goofy about the deer droppings nearby and I reacted with an exaggerated look of disgust. She laughed so hard that she spat some cookie crumbs into my face and of course, that was even more hilarious. The moment reminded me of times when another little girl, my daughter, had laid her head against my chest and when that little guy, my son, had wrestled with me in the meadow, laughing out loud.

We finished the cookies and Emma announced, “We better get Henry back to the barn and wash the mud from the tires.” She jumped up and put the lunch bag into the trailer while I shook the crumbs from the blanket. She paused to watch a flock of geese pass overhead and I could see the wonder in her eyes as she followed their flight. The November sun lit her face and cast long shadows across the field. Then she turned and ran to me, smiling. She hugged me hard and said, “I love you Bompa. C’mon, let’s go for a tractor ride!” It goes without saying that this was the balm I needed for what ailed me. So it is with this place: It’s all there is in the world. It contains everything there is to know or possess.

I hike uphill and feel the strain of leg muscles working to propel me forward. I think of the power of the Belgian work horses that used to work this field. I wonder about the farmer manning the plow, ordering the horses, cajoling them, praising or cussing them. I wonder if he even had the time to give a thought to things sublime or everlasting? I know we shared the same first name and we both lived a good portion of our lives atop this hill. But I can never know if he pondered anything beyond crop cycles and gettin’ things done. Artifacts he left behind speak of his craftsmanship and I like to believe he had an artistic bent, if only utilitarian. I can suppose he appreciated, as well as any one of us, the special awareness of sense-of-place. Perhaps, at the end of the day, he had some abstract thoughts along the lines of those I am recalling now in the more eloquent words of Robert Duncan:

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

That is not mine, but a made place,

That is mine, it is so near to the heart,

An eternal pasture folded in all thought

So that there is a hall therein

That is a made place, created by light

Wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

The sun-heated dew is lifting from the meadow and the fog is blurring the trees at its border. Within the fog, at a distance removed, a deer rises from the grass and stands still as a statue. It watches me as I stay my position. A minute goes by. Then with a flick of its tail it leaps into the tree line, there where the wood chunks from the fallen oak are stacked. Against the stack leans the splitting maul left behind from the previous day. There’s some work left to be done. For a moment though, I let my mind wander as I stare into the mist. There are forms taking shape within the shifting fog, vague shadowy figures assuming a familiarity of posture and bearing. I welcome the visitations and give license to imagination and illusion.