Country Life: Upstate Burgeoning

I CANNOT be what I am not. However long I live in the country, I will always be a city guy who writes; maybe a suburban kid who read and wanted to write. Nothing startling about that. How many rural poets were actual farmers? Hesiod maybe; John Clare. Most bards of the simple life have been second-homers (Horace, Virgil) or soldiers in the occupation force of the upper class (Jefferson). But even a provisional acquaintance with country life can make the classics real in a way that a class with Harold Bloom couldn’t. Having a weekend house in a field is a year-long field trip.

Summer’s third quarter has begun, and with it, the mad production of fruit and vegetables that will run until Halloween. They march like cars from old Detroit, or computer geeks from modern India, prolific, unstoppable. Among the first wave are the cucumbers. Left to themselves, they will climb a bit; overnight, a cucumber vine can twirl a runner around a filament of a hardware-cloth fence that is almost as tough as the hardware cloth itself. The sun coaxes the cucumber plants up. But gravity, more potent, pulls them down. They try to take shortcuts to sunlight, running out sideways, shoving aside melons and onions and whatever else is in their path. Crowds in the Times Square subway station are more polite. If the gardener doesn’t intervene, he is left with a tangle of cables, the cucumbers themselves as hidden as submarines, cruising under their leaves.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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I CANNOT be what I am not. However long I live in the country, I will always be a city guy who writes; maybe a suburban kid who read and wanted to write. Nothing startling about that. How many rural poets were actual farmers? Hesiod maybe; John Clare. Most bards of the simple life have been second-homers (Horace, Virgil) or soldiers in the occupation force of the upper class (Jefferson). But even a provisional acquaintance with country life can make the classics real in a way that a class with Harold Bloom couldn’t. Having a weekend house in a field is a year-long field trip.

Summer’s third quarter has begun, and with it, the mad production of fruit and vegetables that will run until Halloween. They march like cars from old Detroit, or computer geeks from modern India, prolific, unstoppable. Among the first wave are the cucumbers. Left to themselves, they will climb a bit; overnight, a cucumber vine can twirl a runner around a filament of a hardware-cloth fence that is almost as tough as the hardware cloth itself. The sun coaxes the cucumber plants up. But gravity, more potent, pulls them down. They try to take shortcuts to sunlight, running out sideways, shoving aside melons and onions and whatever else is in their path. Crowds in the Times Square subway station are more polite. If the gardener doesn’t intervene, he is left with a tangle of cables, the cucumbers themselves as hidden as submarines, cruising under their leaves.