All Quiet on the Rustic Front

Just in case you were under the impression that living in the country is quiet and peaceful, please read on and I will correct your worldview, for the rural USA anyway.

We moved to the country 18 years ago. At the time I had horses and a case of nostalgia for how I grew up. I figured that if I could simply walk out the door to the barn I would be able to ride more often. That turned out not to be true (I can imagine horse people nodding) but that’s a subject for a different essay.

Wearing my green-tinted country glasses, I had probably forgotten many facts about living in rural America. And of course 30+ years had passed and some things had changed—namely the number of combustion engines necessary to beat into submission the plants that surround us.

My dad had a lawnmower graveyard—he was forever tinkering with mowers and had created a number of Frankentractors assembled from parts autopsied from machines that were in his junk pile. We kids learned to drive on tractors—operating a manual transmission is my only driving superpower; I certainly can’t park worth shit. Of course that skill is largely obsolete at this point.

Anyway, we had a garden tractor and a regular gas-powered mower, and that was really it. No weed whackers, no leaf blowers, and no chainsaw, even though we had a Franklin stove. My dad used to enjoy cutting wood the old fashioned way and our 17 acres provided all we needed.

Sridhar and I bought our first house in the college town where he’d gotten a postdoc. A year in Dallas working for Mobil Oil just wasn’t our thing. We have fond memories of that small house and the garden I created both front and back. The yard was small enough to cut with a non-motorized reel mower, which our next-door neighbor also had. We used it at two subsequent places we lived. But it wasn’t going to cut it on our 11 acre property in the country.

Our parcel was a former bean field owned but the nearby Hanover canning company. No trees, mostly clear, but with a substantial thicket of invasive Russian olive. We knew we didn’t want the acres of toxic turf preferred by our neighbors. But we still wanted a lawn that would be substantially larger than our in-town place. So we bought our first lawn tractor as well as a self-propelled push mower. Those plus the horses could take care of the lawn. I used electric fence tape to temporarily section off areas that they could graze, in addition to their designated pasture. But along the fence and driveway we needed to cut back some of what was growing there, a mix of natives and invasives. Sridhar bought a scythe—he has a soft spot for vintage tools. Meanwhile our Amish neighbors were using a gas-powered weed whacker, and were no doubt amused by the new resident, person of color cosplaying the grim reaper.

Eventually we did buy an electric weed whacker, but we continued to eschew the chainsaw, the leaf blower, the edger, the snow blower, the hedge clippers, the brush hog, and whatever else one needs in the War Against Plants. Meanwhile our neighbors embraced every combustion engine known to humankind. Even the Amish, who rent our front field, use an engine pulled by mules to cut the hay, much to our bemusement. One of our neighbors is a professional landscaper, and if you look at the satellite imagery on Google Earth, you will note the precision with which he has planted every tree and shrub. He bordered our parcel with an impressive hedge of arbor vitae—I am sure our chaotic approach to “landscaping” triggered his OCD. His property requires a lot of maintenance. Other locals have noticed our style of (not) doing things and we sometimes get a knock on the door and a person asking if we “need them weeds cut?”

Beyond the care of the garden/lawn/driveway, our neighbors embrace the combustion engine for leisure as well. ATVs are popular with children and adults alike. Sridhar and I often wonder how roaring up and down country roads all day can be so endlessly entertaining. I suppose I sound old and curmudgeonly if I mention that we used to ride bicycles, and still do. Snowmobiles are out and about in winter if we have snow; in recent years we haven’t had much of it. Neighbor kids will assume they can ride on your property until you yell at them. Riding a horse on someone’s property seems to meet with more objection. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the possibility of horse shit is offensive.

Another favorite activity is setting off fireworks. It doesn’t have to be a 4th of July celebration. It can be a birthday or a graduation or any random summer night. It doesn’t matter what time either. Gunshots can be lumped into this category as well. If you look at local road signs you will see that they are pockmarked with holes. I rescued a cat that had been shot by one of my neighbors—his leg needed to be amputated. It’s fortunate that I never found out who did it because I am a lioness protector when it comes to animal friends.

One of our neighbors has a large agribusiness dairy farm. I have no idea how much acreage they own but it’s well into the hundreds, spread over several townships. When they harvest, giant trucks drive into the fields and are loaded up with hay or silage. These trucks haul the feed to where it’s stored, some distance away. The drivers are paid by the trip so they have incentive to go fast. There’s a stop sign on our country road and as the trucks approach it (loudly) they never really stop but instead deploy the Jake brakes to slow down a little at the intersection. This goes on all day for however long the harvest takes. Just try meditating with that in the background.

Sridhar and I often say to each other that we live in the worst possible timeline, noise-wise. My grandfather was a farmer who used horses. In the future we’re thinking that people won’t use the fossil-fueled combustion engine—at least one hopes not—the effects of climate change are clear. But in Trump’s America the death rattle of engines will no doubt last longer tha it would have with different “leadership.”

I don’t know how much longer we’ll live in rural America. Probably not long. I don’t have horses anymore and the other barnyard animals have come and gone. We’re tired of driving 15 miles every time we need coffee or cat treats. I long to live in a place where I can walk to a café or bookstore, instead of enduring the greedscape of parking lots and strip mall hell. I don’t like that there’s a gun shop with a picture of Trump packing heat on a flag, just 2 miles up the road.

But at 5:30 in the morning humans are generally quiet and I can hear a catbird and a cedar waxwing, a yellowthroat and a cardinal. In the evening I listen for a willow flycatcher with its dry insect-like call, and a hummingbird buzzes to the salvia. And often at dawn and dusk, the eerie tremolo of a screech owl enters my soul. Those are the country sounds I will miss.