The
Brady Archive
The
Country Side of Life
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
37, bookzine on Inaka, the Japanese Countryside)
When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number
of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big
way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals,
not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a
welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that
characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.
The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind
of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as
an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers.
City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let
alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way,
isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial
countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots
with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts.
And the sky — in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too,
the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline."
Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts
in your eye.
Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there
(not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original
meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds
actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling
pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks,
thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails,
owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that
can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees
the city plants along the avenues. And insects — not cockroaches,
which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family — but
genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about
their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills
and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in
the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as
evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at
dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes
in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.
And in the spring and summer eve and morn the oratorio of the frogs
of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which
worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country
but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional
snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden
or something, not to mention brief glimpses of ferret fox boar stag
raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters
which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking
of wet laundry.
And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the
underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly
party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different
from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no
natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial
one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief
to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island
syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a
kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the
difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor
dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced
in these respective locales, but I will.
In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere
and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the
diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're
so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when
autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the
masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the
very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on
canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing,
you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission
fee.
And then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies
of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for
days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable
sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but
a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where
pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and
ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast
a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside
about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes
pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often
excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country
snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil
from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring
is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs,
its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales
of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty
nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.
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