On
the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving
past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a
shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than
rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a
fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence,
though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands
of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into
the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green
and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the
right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the
soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle
of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part,
indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of
dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the
soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What
corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the
similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the
second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to
wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs,
they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch
where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks
poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes,
and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates
is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their
noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn
nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of
the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own,
ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles
from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search
of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to
welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves
in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and
opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a
passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out
windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more
easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that
fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch
and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the
rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent from the lightning-struck
tree. You’ve passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if
you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does
everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?
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