Perfection of the Morning (20 page)

A few years ago at a dance, in the context of a conversation I no longer remember, I remarked to the table of couples Peter and I were sitting with, “This life is great for men, but it’s killing for women.” There was dead silence around the table, I never knew if because of embarrassment at my speaking aloud a taboo sentiment or, as I thought, more likely because every couple at the table had had long, anguished, and ultimately unresolvable conversations in the dark of night about that very subject. Indeed, what man would give up his farm or his ranch and a life he loved merely because his wife was less than fulfilled? But it was many years before this fact came home to me as closer to universal rather than as merely my own problem, at least in this sense of women needing personally fulfilling activities, and a little more variety and stimulation in daily life.

As I read and wrote and dreamt, it began to seem clear to me that all our women’s lives in this century were false to the extent that we had only one model for life and it was the one devised by males for us, and that we were lost and twisted and at sea and would not find our own strength, the rightness of our lives, and the beauty of our womanliness until we found out who, in our deepest female essence, we are. Now the story of Persephone began to seem to me to be a story about not only my life but lives of all women, stolen away from girlhood and our mother’s protection into the world of men, of Eros, never to be persons in our own right. I thought that if women are often petty and small-minded on occasion and bicker endlessly with one another in ways less characteristic of men, it might be because we have no dignity in our womanhood and never say to ourselves, I am a woman, as men say, I am a man, to remind themselves of the nobility and courage this image requires of them. I did not think our subjugation would end until each of us were able to say from the depth of our soul, I am a woman, meaning, I
am half the universe, I am made in the image of the goddess, as men at least for the last five thousand years have been saying, I am made in the image of God.

Women experience the world differently than men do. Experiencing it differently, we know different things about it than they do, we experience
life
differently, and if left alone to try it, we would live it differently. And as a writer I thought, We haven’t yet told our stories out of the fullness and uniqueness of our femininity. We haven’t yet told the truth about our lives. Until we tell the truth out loud, no matter how humiliating or painful or at variance with society’s version, we will not come to know what we are, what is truly our world of experience, and through that, what our roles should be, what we can be.

That was one result of my long sojourn in the metaphorical wilderness—I began to believe I had to write out of that deep, abandoned, forgotten, ignored and discredited place in myself where surely I would find what there was in me that was wholly woman. I thought, The only way to find out what a woman is and might be is to speak only the truth out of one’s own feelings. I had been tending toward what is dismissively referred to by scholars as “confessional” writing as it was. Now I thought, I am a writer; why else would I write except to express how
I
experience the world? I wanted to cut away what I had been taught, I wanted to shut my eyes and close my ears and my door and only write from the deepest part of myself, to say how things seem to me, what I honestly think about my life and the lives of women, or further, what I honestly
feel
before thought, about the world and my experience in it. I would use the material around me, but I would see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears, sense it with my own body.

Because I was writing a novel about women’s lives, one of the issues I examined with seriousness was why it was I felt I could not have friendships of the kind I’d had in the city with women in the country. What was it I had talked about with my old friends that I couldn’t find anybody to talk with in the same way here? The conversations with my city friends, for one thing, had a high degree of intimacy even in friendships of very short duration, acquaintanceships really, which here, as nearly as I can tell, seem to take years to build. That was one difference. The other was subject matter. My city friends and I had talked about feelings, more than anything, I think. With great subtlety, shades, nuances, of feeling and emotion were dissected and laid bare. All this to a degree that my country friends would regard as obssessive and peculiar, perhaps going too far, going beyond the limits of good taste where privacy is concerned on the one hand, and on the other, approaching triviality, even wasting time when there is work to be done.

Perhaps there is no more to it than that—beyond, of course, the unavoidable fact that all my urban friends were part of the university environment where talk is highly valued as the means of exploring ideas and developing them, where one might display one’s wit and articulateness to mutual joy, where talk is an art form. But while urban academic people believe anything can be said, and would be better for it, rural people tend to take the opposite view, feeling much is better left unsaid, and that judicious silence has, on occasion, a greater eloquence, is the greater good. Even on “coffee row,” where talk is, as they say, cheap, this style of conversing prevails.

I am a writer; I am a thinker, and sometimes a talker. Nothing seems full and real to me until I have either talked about it or, as is most often the case, written it out, crossed it out, written it again and again and again till it makes sense to me. I will always go too
far, say too much, examine nuances too minutely for everyday life. Also, I see now that my expectations were wrong in the first place; those old tête-à-têtes came out of a different way of life, different expectations and experiences, a different fabric of day-to-day life. Thirdly, those virtually obssessive conversations were, I think, all of us, each of us, working out our own destinies in the way available to us in such a milieu. That was how we did it, but it is not how country women do it.

I inhabit another world now, where all of this is worked out physically, in canning and sewing and driving the combine, where sorrow and rage and bewilderment are worked out in sky and hills, grass and wind, in the song of the meadowlark and the nightly cries of the coyotes, in the mystery of the northern lights and the moon and stars.

As the years had passed it had become increasingly clear to me that I could not live a life like the women around me no matter how much beauty I found in it. Peter didn’t expect me to, I had no children at home to care for, and it seemed foolish and empty to live the form of the life without the content—canning and pickling for nobody, changing sheets twice a week and ironing them for somebody who couldn’t care less about that sort of thing, and I cared nothing for it myself, staying home every day in an empty house. Understanding that and then accepting it in a final way took a long time, the understanding of it the longest.

Once I faced that, and that I could not erase my past, everything that I had been, everything that I knew, my personal history, the next step simply came clear to me one day as I stood looking out the northwest window toward the distant butte that marked the place where the history of the town of Eastend began. The women
here are right: I
am
different from those who were born here and grew up here and lived their lives here. It is no use at all to try to be like them; it is time I stopped trying, stopped even thinking about trying. It is time I accepted my life for what it has been, time that I accepted myself for what I am.

From that moment on everything grew easier. I no longer made any effort to camouflage my differences, or felt inferior because I wasn’t able to do the things the other women were so competent at. After ten years my roughest edges had been worn away and in company I don’t think I stood out quite so starkly. It was in the end, after so much heartbreak, such a simple insight, one anybody wiser or more mature than I was would have seen at once.

Now, having accepted myself for the person I was or had become, I realized I had also to accept certain conditions, one of which was that I would be lonely, that I would never be in the middle of a group of women who were intimate personal friends as I had been in the city. It was true, too much separated us, a big part of which had become my life as a professional writer, with its necessary solitude and yet its unnerving but unavoidable publicness.

But more even than my coming to an understanding of how I would live here in contentment was a growing understanding of the true nature of the long crisis which I had weathered and of the meaning of the cycle of dreams I had had. Now I saw that what I had been through was certainly triggered by the dramatic and sudden change in my life when I had left the city behind and come into an alien environment to make my life. But where for years I had thought my crisis was a particular, specific one having to do with how I would live my life in this environment, and had blamed it—this environment—for my pain, I finally began to see that it had been something else entirely.

What I had been through was a mid-life crisis, or just a major life crisis. Everyone goes through it when signs of aging can no longer be ignored and when older family members begin to die and for the first time one faces the inevitability of one’s own death. But for many people it appears as vague dissatisfaction, puzzlement, depression without a clear cause, or a breaking out of the confines of one’s life in destructive ways. Sometimes it results in complete breakdown. In my case, because I was largely alone, because I had a scholarly bent and an artistic nature and no very severe practical problems in my life, I allowed it to happen. I didn’t fight it, but actually reveled in it, and having no one at all to help me, I resolved to understand it myself. With the help of many wonderful books, and using my journals as analyst-listener, I came through it.

Though so much of it is beyond my understanding even now, I want to say something about how nourishing, enlightening, comforting and yet disturbing Nature was to me during all of this. How my greatest insights and most disturbing experiences occurred when I was out walking alone on the prairie and how I came at last to understand my life as a part of, as a manifestation of, that larger life by which I felt myself to be surrounded. If, through Nature, I came to understand more about my own life, I also came to understand more about life. I cannot imagine how this could be done—that is, if one is a woman, and if one has no help—in the midst of a city. The only possible way to come to an understanding involving Nature is by being in Nature. And as a woman, I think coming to an understanding of and building a relationship with Nature is essential in order to understand oneself.

In my ruminations on the connection between the feminine soul I’ve spoken of, the Wise Woman who appeared in my dreams when I most needed her, and Nature as feminine, or women as in some
respects synonymous with Nature, I can come to no hard and fast conclusions. Sometimes I think that the small vision I had the morning I began this book of that beautiful field I walk in, which I took as an omen or a blessing, was not given by the spirits of the past, as I’d thought, but was instead a manifestation of Nature itself. I wonder if the woman I saw in my dreams and that small, exquisite, soul-satisfying vision were not one and the same.

During the years that I was beating my way through the thickets of self-delusion, the world around me was not static. In fact, the agricultural world was facing a growing crisis too, a crisis of such huge proportions and breadth that everybody around me was eventually affected by it to some degree. One major factor was drought.

From my journal:

June 29, 1984: 11:10 a.m. It is 91 degrees F. and the wind must be blowing up to 50 m.p.h. That hot wind and lack of moisture (last July we had a 3-day rain and virtually nothing since) is ruining the hay and the grain crops. Even my vegetable and flower gardens won’t grow. The sky is a pale, dusty blue at the horizon and higher up where the dust doesn’t reach it, it is the usual bright blue of summer. Anxiety Butte is faded by the haze of dust in the air. The hay crop is short and thin and burning at the bottom and the crested wheat grass in the yard has whitish tips and is pale dun below. The road is crumbling to dust. Everything looks white, even the air, even the grass and trees that have been watered and are green, and the earth between the
back door and the carragana hedge is blown bare and is white and cracking. People who are overextended are worried sick.

1:20 p.m.: 98 degrees F.

2:00 p.m.: 101 degrees F. in the shade of the deck. Still blowing.

5:30 p.m.: A dust storm. For some time clouds—normal thunderclouds, not very serious-looking—had been coming from the south and there had been thunder occasionally for about an hour. I looked up and a dust storm was on us from the southwest. Everything was obliterated by the fine brown air. It lasted only ten minutes or so and then vanished and a hard rain came down briefly. In those moments the temperature fell 20 degrees to 75 degrees F., but the wind never stopped.

July 16, 1984: All the cattle have been sent out of the P.F.R.A. pasture three months early because all the waterholes have dried up. The constant sound of wind in your ears.

September 1, 1984: We’re almost out of water here. The river is barely flowing.

July 29, 1985: Our grain crop has been written off 100% in all fields.

The summer of 1984 we set records for heat every day from July first to the eleventh. Peter reported that the hay crop was the worst since he’d taken over the hay farm in 1965 and young grasshoppers were detected everywhere in the grass. Farmers in Saskatchewan, the worst hit by the drought, began to hold the first of the drought meetings trying to get help from the government, and everybody scrambled to pull in any slack, while those in the most precarious financial position began to lose their farms. But, for the most part, people believed this was just another drought in the relatively predictable cycle of droughts, and that those who could had only to wait it out and prosperity would soon return.

I had a roof over my head and three square meals a day because Peter raised cattle for market and sold them, because he had some farmland (farmed by others), and whether it rained or not or the winds blew too hard or spring was early or late or the winter colder or warmer than usual with more or less snow were matters of importance to me as they were to the people in whose midst I was living. Hardly noticing I had, I’d begun to watch the sky for signs of rain, for cold fronts moving in, for approaching storms, or blessed Chinooks and to study cloud formations and sunsets for clues as to the next day’s weather. In the early eighties when the rain began to fail, the drought was of grave interest to me for more than its sociological effects.

One major consequence was that we had to sell a liner-load of cows and calves, unheard of on the Butala ranch and which might be compared to starting to live off the capital instead of the interest from your trust fund, or like selling off parcels of your land. Peter took this step because the drought had meant there was no hay crop with which to feed them in the winter, and because no grass had grown there was no grazing either, with the result that we
had to buy a lot of expensive feed. For the first time in quite a while people with cattle had an edge on those who raised only grain, because we could at least sell cattle, while people with only grain to sell, what there was of it, were encountering additional problems having nothing to do with drought.

Other factors, too, were at work which hadn’t been foreseen by most farmers during the good times. Overall, farm input costs—chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, machinery and fuel—went up about three hundred percent in that ten-year period from the time the cash from the huge crops of the last half of the seventies hit the farm economy, into the early eighties when the bonanza began to dry up.

As if drought and the increase in input costs weren’t bad enough, bank interest rates hit an astonishing high—up to twenty-four percent on borrowed money, and since nearly everybody ran their farms or ranches on operating loans, the fiscal system itself began to put people out of business, regardless of their continued ability to grow grain or raise livestock. By 1989 in most places the drought had ended, but it no longer mattered whether we could grow grain or not, because increasingly either we couldn’t sell it or the prices we could get for it were below what it cost to produce it.

For the first time farmers had to face the fact that stiff competition in grain markets wasn’t something they were going to be able to beat. Countries which had bought Canadian grain had now become exporters themselves, while others became at least self-sufficient, and as buyers became fewer, the sellers began to compete even harder and grain prices fell to lows unheard of for the generation currently on the farms. There was constant talk about the greenhouse effect—global warming—which would ruin the western climate for grain farming. And nobody was admitting it,
but in parts of the Palliser Triangle the land was dying as a consequence of its being marginal farmland in the first place, of which too much had been asked for too long. It wasn’t that the present was bad and growing more desperate, it was also that the future had suddenly turned from apparently limitless to a brick wall.

I was privy to the endless conversations about the situation when Peter’s friends dropped in for coffee or we dropped in to their kitchens. I heard the amazement, the anger, the bitterness, the sadness, the “if” talk and the potential solutions dreamt up by this one or that one. If I was surprised at anything it was at how civilized everybody managed to be, no matter how bad his/her situation. People seemed to feel helpless to force out of the powers that be whatever changes were needed to save farms and farmers. I have the impression that most people were coming to see that no government had a clue what to do—or that governments knew what to do, but refused for political reasons to do them. There were meetings and protests, but compared to the rage of, for example, the rioters of Los Angeles who in an orgy of violence burned, looted and otherwise destroyed in response to the racism which blighted their lives, or even the vocal militance of farmers in France, the protests of prairie farmers, whose lives were also being broken in a way apparently impossible for city dwellers to imagine, seemed to me to be surprisingly muted.

But then, I think there was a part of most agricultural people which remained disbelieving, which did not fully realize the extent and apparent irreversibility of the catastrophe. Raised for a least two generations on the myth that we were “the breadbasket of the world,” we didn’t find it easy to look in the eye so basic a belief, the framework on which three generations had built their lives and a whole society, and see that this was no longer true and, in fact,
probably never had been. If the agricultural people’s fatal flaw had been hubris, and I believe it was, they had been led into it by short-sighted governments and the so-called experts who were themselves only the common people with degrees, and by agricultural corporations and financial institutions whose only mandate or interest was to make as much money as possible out of the work, the hardship, of others.

All of this has been documented in countless magazine articles, radio broadcasts and television specials, and somewhere, no doubt, somebody is writing the definitive book about the end of the family farm on the Canadian Prairies. Nothing was the way it had been ten years earlier. Wherever necessity dictated and there were jobs to be found, farm people went to work off the farm. Women who had always been available to help with farm work at home and to drive kids to after-school activities were suddenly at work in the bank, the credit union, the grocery store, school, hospital or senior citizens’ lodge, jobs which might help keep body and soul together, but which had little or nothing to do with self-fulfillment, and which took women away from the satisfaction of spending the day in the midst of natural beauty. As a result of economic stress rural life was changing so quickly that the old “traditional” life was getting harder and harder to find. I had moved from the city into a world I thought was in some ways idyllic and now, with truly breathtaking rapidity, it seemed it was dying.

I began to see the lives of the people around me as not merely picturesque, interesting, or beautiful (and therefore as removed from me), but as
real.
It wasn’t just that their losses were real in terms of real pain, real suffering, but that it was coming clear to me that the grain farmers of Western Canada had built the world out of their own sweat and muscle-power and bank of knowledge
handed down from generation to generation—they and the members of my own family had spent their lives doing hard work with small rewards. If I found it hard to lose what I had had for such a short time—the wide, wild fields around me, the animals, the slower and more meaningful pace of life—how much harder for those who had never known any other life, nor their parents and sometimes their grandparents before them.

At the same time I was beginning to get phone calls from magazine, newspaper and radio editors and researchers who wanted someone with a proven record as a writer, who actually lived in the midst of the crisis and was directly affected by it, to write about it. This too forced me into looking at its genesis and history in a more comprehensive and fundamental way. I had to study the situation as a scholar would, with the additional advantage of having a good measure of skepticism at anything that smacked of conventional wisdom. (For the first time since I’d left the university, I found myself grateful for the training in research I’d received in grad school.) I had around me the evidence of my eyes, my own family history as westerners behind me, and the stories of the families in the Palliser Triangle, all things which most scholars and most journalists who came from Vancouver and Toronto to report on what was going on in Saskatchewan lacked.

And I had Peter, an unconventional thinker if ever there was one, clever, patient, and in whose long silences a lot of cogitation had gone on over the years. He had some clear ideas about what had gone wrong, and more, about what really mattered, what losses counted in the ongoing stream of life, and what didn’t, out of which I might discern what the essence of rural life really is.

I thought of Thomas Hardy’s account of the agricultural workers of late-nineteenth-century England in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
,
of Tolstoy in
Anna Karenina
writing about the Russian peasants at work on the land, of Knut Hamsun in
The Wayfarers
chronicling the lives of the working poor of Norway. I thought of Patrick White’s magnificent
The Tree of Life
, and much later, of Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm.
I remembered my first attempt at writing a novel seven or eight years earlier, how it was to have been about the life of an urban, academic, single parent, how I thought I had nothing else of interest to write about. Now I saw how insular and blind I had been.

I had come to know my way around the countryside, I had stood in the midst of a field of our ruined wheat that was singing with grasshoppers, I had climbed the fence and stood with my husband in what was left after it had been destroyed by hail, I had helped pull calves in the spring, I had sat proudly in the sale ring while the auctioneer sold our big steers, and held the twitch while the vet cut out a growth on a horse’s face. And I used all this, every incident, every—to me—astonishing detail of my new life, in my writing. If I could do nothing more, I told myself, I could pay intense and precise attention, I could at least make a detailed, accurate record of life here and what had happened to it that wouldn’t be the self-serving version of those who had made it happen, but would be told from the point of view of the people who had lived it and suffered it.

As I write this we are calving. In the past two weeks I’ve been present at the births of five or six calves, running to get equipment, helping get the heifer into the barn or corral, on one occasion narrowly escaping being flattened by a cow who’d decided to leave through a gate I was standing at, not yet having made up my mind whether to go in or stay out. Peter teased me about it, saying he didn’t know I could still move that fast. I never get over the excitement
of seeing that calf emerge, at that moment when it opens its eyes and blinks and its sides tremble with its first breaths of air. “It’s alive!” I always catch myself saying in astonishment and joy, and “Welcome to the world!” to the little creature. If the grim inevitability of death is always present in rural life, so is the never-ending surprise and joy at the birth of new life.

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.